[hexxagone]

"Arithmetic coding is much, much simpler." Let us agree to disagree. "And decompression speed is not a limiting factor in most applications of data compression like this". It depends on the application. Zstd and Brotli are certainly aiming at the fastest decompression speed possible.

[user-the-name]

Arithmetic coding can be implemented in as little as maybe ten lines of code. It is far simpler than Huffman coding.

[hexxagone]

The Huffman encoding loop is 2 lines and decoding loop is 4 lines of branchless code. Do you have an example of branchless arithmetic encoder or decoder ?