Version 0.8.0 of R’s fst package has been released to CRAN. The package is now multi-threaded allowing for even faster serialization of data frames to disk.

The fst package uses LZ4 and ZSTD to compress columnar data. In the latest release, methods compress_fst and decompress_fst were added which allow for direct (multi-threaded) access to these excellent compressors.

The fst package uses the xxHash algorithm for internal hashing of (meta-)data. With method hash_fst the user now has direct access to this extremely fast hashing algorithm.