[Jasper_]

What a weird take. Have you written a deflate/inflate implementation? Deflate really isn't just LZSS (I assume you mean something like Haruhiko Okumura's LZSS?), followed by Huffman, it's a very intertwined and sophisticated combination of LZ77 and Huffman. How the two work together is integral to why Deflate works as well as it does.

The optimal parse here isn't always to pick the greediest match from the LZ77 perspective and then "run it through Huffman", you have to know the Huffman cost model when picking your LZ77 matches.

[StillBored]

I wrote a zip decompressor many years ago, the compression side wasn't really much of a target, because the focus was on compressing with a more speed focused algorithm. At the time it was a pretty distinct portion of my decompression pass. I didn't know they were picking matches based on the compressed size vs just longest match, but I guess it makes sense, but I don't see why that "intertwines" it anymore than any other adjustment one makes to how one finds matches (which is AFAIK generally the largest change in all the LZ variations).

edit: Just as a note, actually doing it as two distinct passes rather than at the same time would be silly since its going to significantly slow it down. So just because its doing the entire thing as a single "pass" doesn't count IMHO.