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.

Support for a variety of archive and compression formats . Robust automatic format detection, including archive/compression combinations such as tar.gz. Zero-copy internal architecture for high performance. Streaming architecture eliminates all limits on size of archive, limits on entry sizes depend on particular formats. Carefully factored code to minimize bloat when programs are statically linked. Growing test suite to verify correctness of new ports. Works on most POSIX-like systems (including FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.) Supports Windows, including Cygwin, MinGW, and Visual Studio.