Zstd: Does Zstandard support password compress/decompress?

[arden]

Does Zstandard support password compress/decompress?

[terrelln]

What do you mean by that? Zstd does not do encryption.

[Cyan4973]

This functionality is generally found at archiver level,
like @mcmilk's excellent 7-zip Zstandard edition

[ghost]

are there any plans for archiving support in near future?( i know about mcmilk's 7z-zstd)

[Cyan4973]

Compressors and Archivers are 2 different layers of responsibility.

Sure, archivers _typically_ use compressors (though not always, see tar), but they have a lot more metadata to handle, such as file names, regenerating directory trees, random access, keeping track of special permissions, dates and time, inter-OS compatibility, etc. and yes, possibly encryption.
All these topics are totally out of scope for a compressor.

7zip is an archiver, it proposes all these possibilities. And can use multiple compression algorithms.
zstd is a compression algorithm, like gzip, or xz. Its goal is to be used by archivers, not to become one.

The same is true on the other side : a compressor has _many_ different use cases (see https://facebook.github.io/zstd/#references for a glimpse), and an archiver is just one of them.

[izanbf1803]

@arden Why not just compress with zstd and use another protocol to encrypt the compressed data?
Because zstd was created to compress very fast, but encryption is slower and many times, data doesn't need to be encrypted.
It is not their purpose.