Kai Wang has announced today the BSD ar(1) is available for wider testing. This is amazing work, the creation and list speed are 5-20 times faster than GNU ar(1), and extraction speed is also slightly better than GNU ar(1).

It is also important to note that this version is completely BSD-licensed (yes, that means that you are free from the lair’s license), and is a piece of the vital parts of the FreeBSD DTrace work.