C++ Examples Overview

examples/cpp provides a set of minimal runnable examples. Each example follows the same loop:

read input -> compress -> decompress -> verify

Build

cmake -S examples/cpp -B examples/cpp/build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build examples/cpp/build
ctest --test-dir examples/cpp/build --output-on-failure

Output Format

zstd
input_bytes=...
compressed_bytes=...
ratio=...
verified=true

These Examples Deliberately Stay "Minimal Loop"

They are not performance benchmarks, nor complete SDK wrappers, but help you see three things:

1. What the most basic buffer API of a compression library looks like.
2. What input/output buffers are needed for compression and decompression.
3. Why any learning example should explicitly verify round-trip correctness.

What to Focus on When Reading Examples

Focus Point	Description
How input is read	Examples uniformly read byte array from file
How compression buffer is allocated	Most libraries need to estimate upper bound first
How decompression output size is determined	Some can get from frame, some require caller to know
How error codes are handled	Examples uniformly throw exceptions on failure
How results are verified	Uniformly compare original and restored bytes

About BSC Example

BSC is supported as an optional build target. It demonstrates real compression using libbsc's block sorting approach. Note that libbsc may have build issues on some platforms, so it's disabled by default.

Example List

• ZSTD
• LZMA
• BSC
• LZ4
• zlib
• Brotli