It would be, if only you could load the CPU properly. Huffman decoding is highly serialized—an iteration per symbol in the FSM implementation is somewhat better

It would be, if only you could load the CPU properly. Huffman decoding is highly serialized—an iteration per symbol in the FSM implementation is somewhat better than the loop iteration per bit in the naïve one, but every iteration still depends on basically everything in the previous one; you’re using a fraction of the scalar processing power of the core. Thus modern compressors resorting to format-incompatible tricks like interleaved streams, but how much to interleave depends on which class of CPU you’ll want to decode on.