I'm the author of pixz. As speculated above, I did write pixz before threading support was added to xz. I like to think that pixz prodded Lasse Collin to add multi-threading support to xz sooner.
There are still some differences between pixz and xz, of course. In xz's favour:
- It has far more options
- It's been tested by many more people
- It probably has better code quality—pixz is a prototype gone rampant ;)
But there are still some reasons I like to use pixz:
- It's much smaller, and easier to comprehend
- It supports multi-threaded decompression, which xz does not
- It has special behaviour on tarballs: While performing compression, it also creates an index of all the files in the tarball. This allows a single file to be extracted quickly, even if the tarball is huge.