Techniques for decompressing a compressed input by determining, according to an ordering of allowable codewords, an offset for a variable length codeword detected in the input; accessing a record at the determined offset in a data structure having one record for each of the allowable codewords, each record including a portion for at least one of a literal value and a length value and a portion for a type value indicative of whether the record is for a literal or a length; and determining a decompressed output based at least in part on the accessed record.