I'll be watching this with some interest. A couple years ago I tried using some of the x86_64 assembly versions of inflate_fast() and longest_match() but found them to be subtly buggy -- they'd both sometimes do reads outside of the allocated memory and could crash if that happened to land at the end of a mmap'ed segment. I emailed all of the relevant authors, but nobody seemed to be maintaining that stuff any more. Honestly, just having a zlib with a bug tracker is a huge improvement.

I am sad to see that a lot of the zlib-ng seem to be around code style updates, which will make it hard for things to travel back and forth between the codebases. I guess one branch or another will eventually have to "win", which is sad.

Also, is zlib-ng going to commit to keeping the same zlib license? Some of the zlib improvements floating around on the net have snuck in more restrictive licensing. It would be fantastic if zlib-ng could hold the line on license creep.