ZEST is a virtual compressed filesystem implementation aiming to be a drop in replacement for raw file access through std::filesystem.
ZEST stores multiple virtual files into a single one into your real filesystem, allowing for fast access of small related files. Accessing a thousand files each smaller than 4k in size, can be slow even on a moder machine equiped with SSD. ZEST optimize the multiple access and OS context switch packaging everything in a single file that than is processed as a filesystem in user space.
Using an interface compatible with std::filesystem, ZEST makes this not new idea, easy and cheap to adopt.