CMake Zstd compression

Zstd is an open file compression standard. Zstd has become widely used and is incorporated in the Linux kernel and GCC. We use Zstd for data archiving particularly for large files where size and speed are a concern. CMake supports Zstd compression throughout, including file(ARCHIVE_CREATE) and file(ARCHIVE_EXTRACT). Zstd is vendored into CMake, so there is no need to worry about system shared libraries for Zstd.

file(ARCHIVE_CREATE ... WORKING_DIRECTORY ...) is necessary to avoid system-specific relative path issues.

set(archive "example.zst")
set(in_dir "data/")

file(ARCHIVE_CREATE
  OUTPUT ${archive}
  PATHS ${in_dir}
  COMPRESSION Zstd
  COMPRESSION_LEVEL 3
  WORKING_DIRECTORY ${in_dir}
  )

COMPRESSION_LEVEL

arbitrary, bigger value is more compressed.

FORMAT

not used for Zstd.