Late to the party, but in response to Truls email request on 10/18/2013, there's some less sucky lossless compression/decompression code at <https://code.google.com/p/miniz/> (Zip/deflate & zlib compatible, small, fast) and <https://code.google.com/p/lzham/> (nearly LZMA compression with much faster decompression, Windows only for the time being :/).
-Louis
