The library itself is not intended to serve as a competitor to advanced general purpose compression tools, but rather as a reference or a set of building blocks for custom compression algorithms. The library comes with rich documentation, and the source code is well commented, so it should be easy to use and adapt to specific needs. The Basic Compression Library is completely independent of system functions, such as file I/O or memory allocation routines. As such it can be used in almost any system, ranging from Windows, Mac OS X and Linux-systems to embedded systems.

Also available - miniLZO, a very lightweight subset of the LZO library