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Introduction

A cross-platform archiver written in safe Rust, with a command line, a native window and one shared core.

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Arca is a cross-platform archiver written in Rust. It creates and extracts ZIP, 7z and TAR archives, plus XZ streams, compresses with Deflate or Zstandard across every core of your machine, and encrypts with AES-256. It runs as a single command-line binary, a native desktop window, or the Windows Explorer context menu.

Why another archiver?

Archive parsers are a classic attack surface, and most of the ones in daily use are written in memory-unsafe languages. Arca’s container parsers are written in safe Rust with #![forbid(unsafe_code)] at crate level: a malformed archive produces an error, never memory corruption.

It is also fast. On the machine it was measured on, Arca with Zstandard compressed the Silesia corpus 13.2× faster than zip and 18.1× faster than 7-Zip, on the same two cores. Where it doesn’t win, the benchmarks say so.

At a glance

  • Formats: ZIP with Zip64 (Store/Deflate/Zstandard), 7z (Store/LZMA2 creation and solid reading), ustar TAR, .tar.gz, .tar.xz and standalone .xz. ISO 9660 images are read, never written.
  • Speed: multi-threaded compression, parallel extraction of .zip, and a sub-millisecond cold start.
  • Safety: unsafe-free parsers, bounded header reads and a Zip Slip defence on every entry name.
  • Encryption: ZIP WinZip AE-2; 7z AES-256 with optional encrypted headers. See integrity limits.
  • Interfaces: the arca command line, the arca-gui window and a Windows 11 Explorer menu.
  • License: Apache-2.0, free for personal and commercial use.

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