We are proud to release sourmash v4.8.4, now with even fewer bugs!
In addition to the patches and updates below, we would like to announce the availability of [branchwater](https://github.com/sourmash-bio/pyo3_branchwater), a sourmash plugin that supports **fast, low-memory, and multithreaded** search, compare, and gather operations. [branchwater v0.8.0](https://github.com/sourmash-bio/pyo3_branchwater/releases/tag/v0.8.0) is now available and is between 10 and 100 times faster and lower memory than sourmash. (However, it does not support all the sourmash features; that will come with time!) Please give it a try!
Last but not least, we would like to ask people who use sourmash regularly to [fill out this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSePkHGaJqFSwiBZ9PwudV309fqQ6i9f9s4BVTBQpqXCuglJfw/viewform) so that we can include your information in some of our upcoming requests for funding support. Your use will not be made public but your support _will_ help us continue to develop sourmash!
On to the release notes for sourmash v4.8.4!
Bug fixes:
* fix exponential time explosion in `sig check` (2762)
* fix duplicate md5 in picklist problem (2747)
* avoid compressing sig files in directory output twice (2752)
Developer updates:
* Remove BIGSI and SBT code from Rust layer (2732)
* bump version to 4.8.4-dev (2720)
* build: updates spun off mastiff PR (2723)
* Build: Remove deprecated system_packages from readthedocs (2740)
* build: remove specific tooling that breaks s390x (2725)
* Add cargo deny and bump deps now that MSRV is 1.64 (2724)
Dependabot updates:
* Bump serde_json from 1.0.105 to 1.0.106 (2757)
* Bump actions/checkout from 2 to 4 (2746)
* Bump supercharge/redis-github-action from 1.6.0 to 1.7.0 (2745)
* Bump cachix/install-nix-action from 22 to 23 (2744)
* Bump ouroboros from 0.17.2 to 0.18.0 (2743)
* Bump chrono from 0.4.26 to 0.4.30 (2755)
* Bump thiserror from 1.0.47 to 1.0.48 (2742)
* Bump thiserror from 1.0.44 to 1.0.47 (2730)
* Bump serde_json from 1.0.104 to 1.0.105 (2731)
* Bump actions/upload-artifact from 1 to 3 (2729)