Hallo,
Since I haven't found gzip development mailing list, I am sending it here.
There is a new approach to entropy coding: asymmetric numeral systems.
It has some connection with arithmetic coding, but is simpler: uses a
single natural number as the state, instead of two to represent the
range. Thanks of it, we can put the entire behavior for given large
alphabet probability distribution into a relatively small table: a few
kilobytes for 256 size alphabet.
This way it turns out about 50% faster than Huffman decoding, still
providing accuracy (compression rate) like arithmetic coding.
Here is some implementation: https://github.com/Cyan4973/FiniteStateEntropy
Just replacing Huffman with it, we get improvement of both speed and
compression rate, like recently in Zhuff of Yann Collet:
http://fastcompression.blogspot.fr/2013/12/zhuff-v09-or-first-fse-application.html
I thought it could also improve gzip DEFLATE in the same way?
Best,
Jarek
-- dr Jarosław Duda
Center for Science of Information, Purdue University, USA
http://www.soihub.org/people.php?id=484
