This article walks through the components of a modern LZ compressor.

LZ compression has been around for a long time, but there are still major improvements being made. The deflate algorithm is perhaps the most widely used, implemented initially in PKZIP, and these days finding broad usage in gzip. Modern incarnations are much more powerful, and use a wide array of new tricks. Two examples of the next generation are zstd and lzma. For a comprehensive overview of open source LZ compressors, check out lzbench.

source: L