mbediso is a minimal library that lets you use ISO files (and a custom indexed dialect of LZ4-compressed ISO files) as a high-performance random-access archive format.

This has several advantages for open applications, including allowing end users to unpack your data archives with standard tools and allowing them to edit uncompressed archives.

On targets with slow filesystem code, using a single packed archive instead of a directory tree can improve loading throughput by a factor of 5x!

Despite its name, mbediso is primarily suitable for medium-to-large embedded applications at present (uses heap, typical dynamic memory use of ~200KB, and code size ~10KB). However, it has a number of fallback mechanisms, and uncompressed archives can be (slowly) traversed with as little as ~10KB of dynamic memory. Its aims may evolve depending on user demand.

Please reach out to me in the Issues if you have any questions or comments about this library! I'm interested to hear if it is useful to others.