[djha-skin]

Can you provide examples of other BWT implementations, and instructions and perhaps some of the weaknesses of bzip2? Genuinely interested.

[gliptic]

Check out http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html . The top BWT performer is #22. What it comes down to is the way the BWT output is transformed and entropy-coded afterwards, and various other tricks.

bzip2 only does very basic MTF transformation and Huffman coding, which are not very bit efficient.