The zfec package implements an "erasure code", or "forward error correction
code".

The most widely known example of an erasure code is the RAID-5 algorithm which
makes it so that in the event of the loss of any one hard drive, the stored data
can be completely recovered. The algorithm in the zfec package has a similar
effect, but instead of recovering from the loss of only a single element, it can
be parameterized to choose in advance the number of elements whose loss it can
tolerate.

This package is largely based on the old "fec" library by Luigi Rizzo et al.,
which is a mature and optimized implementation of erasure coding. The zfec
package makes several changes from the original "fec" package, including
addition of the Python API, refactoring of the C API to support zero-copy
operation, a few clean-ups and optimizations of the core code itself, and the
addition of a command-line tool named "zfec".