Rarlab Jun 2026

Roshal does something radical: he designs a new compression algorithm from scratch. Not a tweak. Not a fork. A true original. He calls it — Roshal ARchive .

Later, arrived with LZMA2 compression, often beating RAR’s ratio. And 7-Zip is free and open source. So why does RAR survive? rarlab

Rarlab’s smartest business decision was not WinRAR itself. It was —a proprietary but freely distributable decompression library. Roshal does something radical: he designs a new

The first version is command-line only. Ugly. Brutalist. But engineers notice immediately: RAR compresses better than ZIP, especially on multimedia and executable files. It also introduces —treating multiple files as a single data stream for better ratios. That single feature alone makes RAR the choice for game warez groups, demo scene coders, and anyone distributing large files over 14.4k modems. A true original

– RAR added strong encryption years before ZIP caught up.

Some notable achievements and milestones in RARLAB's history include: