Patent attributes
Technologies for heuristic Huffman code generation include a computing device that generates a weighted list of symbols for a data block. The computing device determines a threshold weight and identifies one or more lightweight symbols in the list that have a weight less than or equal to the threshold weight. The threshold weight may be the average weight of all symbols with non-zero weight in the list. The computing device generates a balanced sub-tree of nodes for the lightweight symbols, with each lightweight symbol associated with a leaf node. The computing device adds the remaining symbols and the root of the balanced sub-tree to a heap and generates a Huffman code tree by processing the heap. The threshold weight may be adjusted to tune performance and compression ratio. Other embodiments are described and claimed.