It looks like the authors just looked at DEFLATE and tweaked it mainly by better engineering and taking into account modern hardware specifications (larger wind

It looks like the authors just looked at DEFLATE and tweaked it mainly by better engineering and taking into account modern hardware specifications (larger window size, ...), but largely ignoring the theoretical research that has been carried out on LZ77 in the last few years. For example a paper from last SODA [1] shows that by using a better optimization algorithm and just simple universal codes instead of Huffman, it is possible to beat zlib in space and compete with Snappy in decompression speed (and I'm sure that the decoder can be further optimized). This is just the last one on the topic but there have been quite a few. Caveats: compression is fairly slow (but can be improved with heuristics) and the datasets used in the experiments are big and very repetitive (so it is not clear how it performs on small files), but still I think that many ideas should finally find their way into modern compression formats. [1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3872v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.3872v1.pdf Disclaimer: the paper authors are from my CS department.