PAQ (particularly ZPAQ) is pretty good at most things because it selects the model which works best. Variants of PAQ tend to be the Hutter Prize winners (paqh) - PPM derivatives are generally excellent at text, source code, HTML, and things with that kind of word-like symbol distribution (which is why PPMd.H in particular is used by RAR and 7-zip for text compression, although RAR selects it automatically and unfortunately 7-zip doesn't seem to, probably because of the extra RAM overhead for decompression that PPMd.H introduces).
However, PAQ tends to be really* slow, largely because it tries more things. It's highly tunable, but people who aren't compression geeks tend to not want to tune their compression. Presets are available.
That's pretty much why it hasn't caught on - speed. There may be some hybrid approaches that deliver a better compromise between context mixing's effectiveness and dictionary coding's speed and memory usage: I guess you could argue LZMA, bringing a Markov-chain algorithm into the mix, is one such, in a way. Sort of.
I'm also a little antsy about ZPAQ formats containing bytecode descriptions of the decompression algorithm needed, and are, broadly speaking, executable (and in some cases, are). That seems like the kind of thing that may invite security problems if approached without due caution.
However, PAQ tends to be really* slow, largely because it tries more things. It's highly tunable, but people who aren't compression geeks tend to not want to tune their compression. Presets are available.
That's pretty much why it hasn't caught on - speed. There may be some hybrid approaches that deliver a better compromise between context mixing's effectiveness and dictionary coding's speed and memory usage: I guess you could argue LZMA, bringing a Markov-chain algorithm into the mix, is one such, in a way. Sort of.
I'm also a little antsy about ZPAQ formats containing bytecode descriptions of the decompression algorithm needed, and are, broadly speaking, executable (and in some cases, are). That seems like the kind of thing that may invite security problems if approached without due caution.