Structure Before Bytes: How Metarc Beats tar+zstd on Real Code

tar+zstd is very hard to beat. So I stopped trying to beat it as a byte compressor. Instead, I tried something else: compress the structure first, then compress the bytes. That is the idea behind Metarc , a small experimental archiver written in Go. It explores what I call metacompression : reducing structural and semantic redundancy across a source tree before applying a standard compressor such as zstd . And on my current source-code benchmark corpus, Metarc is now smaller than tar+zstd on eve