Zip With Blitzy zlib
Mar 31, 2026 • Carly Levinsohn • 4 min read

What do Chrome, Cloudflare, MongoDB, file formats like PNGs or PDFs, and Kubernetes have in common? All of these products leverage zlib: a lightweight, battle-tested C library utilized for data compression and decompression embedded in the Linux kernel, Git, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, PostgreSQL, Apache, Python, Ruby, and nearly every Linux package manager.
Shipped on PlayStation and Xbox consoles, zlib was adopted into the Java Development Kit in version 1.1. First released in May 1995, the data-compression software is one of the most ubiquitous libraries in computing history. After 31 years, it is still written in C.
The CVE history contains several textbook examples of different vulnerability classes the industry is seeking to eliminate. Here are the main bugs to be aware of:
- CVE-2018-25032: a memory corruption flaw in a release that went unpatched for almost four years.
- CVE-2022-37434: a heap-based buffer overflow from improper bounds checking.
- CVE-2023-45853: an integer overflow leading to yet another heap-based buffer overflow.
The Migration that Never Happens
Despite the known memory safety risks and governmental concerns, no one wants to migrate zlib. The mechanics and economics do not work.
Rust talent does not exist at scale, forcing developers into steep learning curves. Development velocity can drop upwards of 30-50% in the first three to six months of Rust adoption in production. The closest public benchmark is Google's Android Keystore rewrite: a small C++ component that took three senior engineers four months at a company with existing Rust infrastructure.
Targeting zlib is harder, requiring 24,000 lines of C implementing three RFC specifications with complex stateful compression logic. The project demands a rare intersection of DEFLATE domain expertise and Rust fluency.
A conservative estimate for a skilled team would be six to twelve months of development with the total lifecycle stretching well beyond that, as only 15% of enterprise migrations finish on time and on budget.
Plus, zlib has no one to do the work. The library is maintained by two contributors with no corporate sponsor. The organizations that depend on zlib (effectively everyone) expects the library to keep working.
The software development community agrees migrating zlib should happen, but nobody can afford to execute. For Blitzy's next open-source contribution, the platform takes on the challenge of zlib.
What Blitzy Built
Blitzy, our autonomous software development platform, produced a complete, idiomatic Rust implementation of zlib in 41 hours. The output is a production-grade library with full specification compliance and a drop-in C compatible interface. The prompt used to create the product was shorter than usual, which highlights Blitzy's decision-making process. See the pull request and project guide that recaps the work.
The achievements for the project are as follows:
- Full DEFLATE format compliance — The Rust port implements RFC 1950 (zlib), RFC 1951 (DEFLATE), and RFC 1952 (gzip) in entirety, the same wire-format capability that every downstream consumer of zlib depends on.
- Zero unsafe in core crate —
#![forbid(unsafe_code)]enforced on zlib-rs core; all unsafe confined to FFI boundary crate. Every CVE zlib had is structurally impossible now. - 541 tests pass (100%) — Including ports of the canonical
test/example.c(34 tests) andtest/infcover.c(20 tests) harnesses, the same tests that the C version uses to prove correctness, ported and passing. - Drop-in C replacement — C-compatible
extern "C"drop-in replacement shared library (libz.so, 540KB). Existing programs linked against zlib can swap in this library without changing a line of code. The migration cost for downstream consumers is zero. - Production-grade code quality —
deny(clippy::all, clippy::pedantic), zero warnings, rustfmt compliant. - 3 working examples — zpipe (pipe compression), minigzip (gzip utility), enough (Huffman table calculator).
- Performance-optimized release profile — Fat LTO, single codegen-unit, opt-level 3, DFA jump thread LLVM flag. Built to compete with C zlib on throughput, not just correctness.
How Autonomous Migration Changes the Math
Conventional SDLC estimates suggest that a project like migrating zlib from C to Rust takes six to twelve months of development with a skilled team. Blitzy challenges that timeline and the assumptions underpinning the lifecycle.
The translation is semantic, not syntactic. A common tool called C2Rust transpiles C syntax into Rust. Leveraging C2Rust, the output compiles, acting functionally equivalent but unsafe. Blitzy's results are fundamentally different, prioritizing memory safety as the primary consideration for migrating from C to Rust. Our output runs under Rust's full safety guarantees. Not because someone audited it after the fact, but because the compiler won't let it build otherwise. Blitzy passes 100% of zlib's canonical test suite: the same test/example.c and test/infcover.c harnesses the C implementation used to validate correctness.
The cost-benefit analysis changes. The economics of legacy migration has always been a cost-benefit problem with a common denominator: costs being too high to justify a large-scale change. The benefits are clear: fewer CVEs, lower maintenance burden, regulatory compliance, and reduced incident response. For libraries like zlib, the gap between cost and benefit will never close. Autonomous development with Blitzy decreases costs and timelines by orders of magnitude, making migration efforts in production roadmaps defensible.
Relying on an autonomous software development platform for migration creates a category shift in which migrations are worth doing for production codebases.
The question becomes not whether to migrate.
Rather, can organizations afford to do migrations the traditional way?
What's Next
Blitzy is committed to pushing the boundaries of technical excellence. If you find any gaps in the project, we thank you for reporting your findings to [email protected] and refining our PR. Review how to use Blitzy in our dev docs.
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