The Intel Storage Acceleration Library is an implementation of the DEFLATE algorithm written in assembly. As a result it is very fast. It can be used as a replacement for zlib.

Unlike libdeflate, ISA-L has a streaming implementation as well as an all-at-once implementation. Libdeflate only has an all-at-once implementation which makes it unsuitable for big compressed files of genomic data (FASTQ format) as these would need to be read into memory entirely.

It would be quite interesting to see how ISA-L compares to the rest of the compression programs. Especially since it is 100%-compatible with the zlib formats. This allows for smooth transition.

From my own experiments my ballpark estimates are that ISA-L is 6x faster when compressing data and 3x faster when decompressing data than zlib. So it would be a quite nice addition to this already impressive comparison of programs.

A disadvantage of adding it would be that it needs an assembler (NASM or YASM) besides a c-compiler since it is written in assembly with C-bindings provided. So it would complicate the build slightly.