Decompressing large zst files

Question

I have a 16gb compressed zst file. how would I decompress it on windows? I do not have the memory to handle the decompressed version, so it needs to be written straight to a file.

Solution

At the risk of sounding obvious, you need a windows decompressor that supports zstandard. Looking at the zstandard homepage, it does seem to include buids for windows - see here. https://github.com/facebook/zstd/releases/download/v1.4.4/zstd-v1.4.4-win32.zip or https://github.com/facebook/zstd/releases/download/v1.4.4/zstd-v1.4.4-win64.zip look like prebuilt executables.

Regarding the amount of memory needed, zstandard can be decompressed in streaming mode, so no need to decompress it completely in memory before writing to the filesystem.