bzip3: A spiritual successor to BZip2 that compresses 26 years of Perl source code to 546 MB

bzip3 is a new compression tool and library that aims to be a better, faster, and stronger successor to the classic BZip2. It combines a Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT) with a context-mixing entropy coder and a Lempel-Ziv+Prediction (LZP) pass, achieving significantly higher compression ratios, especially on text and code. In a benchmark compressing every version of Perl 5 ever released (262 tarballs), bzip3 with a 511 MB block size produced a 546 MB archive, outperforming xz, bzip2, and Zstandard in both size and decompression speed. The project is actively maintained and available under the LGPLv3 license.