Need a Faster Compressor

[Era Scarecrow via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 21 May 2016 at 21:12:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> So really, how good are you at fast code?

I recall being able to get a marginal boost in speed by assigning 
the first 1-2 bytes in preassigned buckets (256 & 65536 
respectively), so you have an immediate 1-2 byte matches 
(skipping the chafe so to speak). Unfortunately memory-wise it's 
highly inefficient and requires 2 passes over the data, and 
probably doesn't play well with cache.

I assume this is related to compressing symbols thread? I 
mentioned possibly considering the LZO library.