LZO is written in ANSI C. Both the source code and the compressed data format are designed to be portable across platforms.
LZO implements a number of algorithms with the following features:
* Decompression is simple and *very* fast.
* Requires no memory for decompression.
* Compression is pretty fast.
* Requires 64 kB of memory for compression.
* Allows you to dial up extra compression at a speed cost in the compressor. The speed of the decompressor is not reduced.
* Includes compression levels for generating pre-compressed data which achieve a quite competitive compression ratio.
* There is also a compression level which needs only 8 kB for compression.
* Algorithm is thread safe.
* Algorithm is lossless.
* LZO supports overlapping compression and in-place decompression.