More importantly, there's been a huge shift in the cost of tables vs multiplications. Back in the 80s and early 90s multiplication was expensive (multiple cycl

More importantly, there's been a huge shift in the cost of tables vs multiplications. Back in the 80s and early 90s multiplication was expensive (multiple cycles) while tables were more or less "free" in comparison, today cache-misses are super-expensive (100s of cycles) while multiplications can be run in parallel (MMX,SSE,etc). Sure a huffman table will probably mostly be in-cache but it'll still be at the cost of cache space. In addition to that various arithmetic encoding methods were patented and thus avoided.