Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing floats at over a gigabyte per second in C#
A few years ago, we wrote csFastFloat, a C# library to parse floating-point numbers faster. Given the string “3.1416”, it computes the binary value 3.1416. TheContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Graduate degrees are overrated
Though I have many brilliant graduate students, I love working with undergraduate students. And I am not at all sure that you should favor people with graduateContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Having fun with modern C++
Recent versions of the C++ language (C++20 and C++23) may allow you to change drastically how you program in C++. I want to provide some fun examples. Thanks to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast can you parse a CSV file in C#?
We often store large datasets using comma-separated-value (CSV) files. The format is simple enough, each line of a text file is made of several values separated...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Table lookups are efficient
When optimizing small functions, I often rely on a table lookup: I replace the actual computation with table of precomputed values. It is often surprisingly efficient...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
From software to reality?
Both the Physics and Chemistry Nobel prizes were awarded to computer scientists in 2024. Computer scientists are emerging as leading figures in the natural sciences...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of Deep Learning, wins Nobel Prize in Physics!
So… in 2024, the Physics Nobel prize was awarded to a Computer Scientist. Is Physics out of ideas? The Nobel Committee just gave a Physics award to a COMPUTER SCIENTIST...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Iterating through matched characters in modern C++: views::filter and coroutine
Consider the following problem. You want to iterate through the characters of a strings and find only those matching some criteria. For example, you might wantContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
It is never too later to write your own C/C++ command-line utilities
Recently, I received an email from an engineer at a prominent company who shared how he managed to save his employer tens of thousands of dollars annually by developing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Replace strings by views when you can
C++ programmers tend to represent strings using the std::string class. Though the implementation might vary, each instance of an std::string might use 32 bytes....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compressing floating-point numbers quickly by converting them to brain floats
We sometimes have to work a large quantity of floating-point numbers. This volume can be detrimental to performance. Thus we often want to compress these numbers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing tiny and very large floating-point values: a programming-language comparison
Most programming languages support floating-point numbers. You typically have the ability to turn a string into a floating-point number. E.g., “3.1416” could be...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster random integer generation with batching
We often generate random integers. Quite often these numbers must be within an interval: e.g., an integer between 0 and 100. One application is a random shuffle...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Reflection-based JSON in C++ at Gigabytes per Second
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a popular format for storing and transmitting data. It uses human-readable text to represent structured data in the form of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Converting ASCII strings to lower case at crazy speeds with AVX-512
AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5, as well as server-side recent Intel processors, support an advanced set of instructions called AVX-512. They are powerful SIMD (Single Instruction...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Evolution of iPhone storage capacity
People who should know better often underestimate how fast our storage capacity has grown. We have been able to get 1 TB of storage on iPhones for the last three...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Storage costs are plummeting
Storage costs are plummeting like a skydiver in freefall—between 10 and 100 times cheaper with each passing decade. Meanwhile, the programmer population is growing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How big are your docker images?
Docker is a standard to deploy software on the cloud. Developers start with an existing image and add their own code before deploying their systems. How big are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How much of your binary executable is just ASCII text?
We sometimes use binary executable which can span megabytes. I wondered: how much text is contained in these binary files? To find out, I wrote a Python scriptContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog