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
Regular Visual Studio versus ClangCL
If you are programming in C++ using Microsoft tools, you can use the traditional Visual Studio compiler. Or you can use LLVM as a front-end (ClangCL). Let us compare...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Computing the UTF-8 size of a Latin 1 string quickly (AVX edition)
Computers represent strings using bytes. Most often, we use the Unicode standard to represent characters in bytes. The universal format to exchange strings online...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 12 2023)
Kenny finds that the returns due to education are declining. Rich countries are spending more on education, with comparatively weaker test results. It costs more...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bit Hacking (with Go code)
At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in ‘registers’ and not individual bits. Thus a programmer...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Serializing IPs quickly in C++
On the Internet, we often use 32-bit addresses which we serialize as strings such as 192.128.0.1. The string corresponds to the Integer address 0xc0800001 (3229614081...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Move or copy your strings? Possible performance impacts
You sometimes want to add a string to an existing data structure. For example, the C++17 template ‘std::optional’ may be used to represent a possible string value...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
International domain names: where does https://meßagefactory.ca lead you?
Originally, the domain part of a web address was all ASCII (so no accents, no emojis, no Chinese characters). This was extended a long time ago thanks to something...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Year 2022: Scientific progress
The year 2022 is over. As with every year that passes, we have made some scientific progress. I found the following achievements interesting: Diluting the blood...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and technology links (January 15 2022)
For under $600, one can buy a 20-terabyte disk on Amazon. Unless you work professionally in multimedia, it is more storage than you need. However, having much storage...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Care is needed to use C++ std::optional with non-trivial objects
We often have to represent in software a value that might be missing. Different programming languages have abstraction for this purpose. A recent version of C++...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Transcoding Unicode with AVX-512: AMD Zen 4 vs. Intel Ice Lake
Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Emojis in domain names, punycode and performance
Most domain names are encoded using ASCII (e.g., yahoo.com). However, you can register domain names with almost any character in them. For example, there is a web...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Quickly checking that a string belongs to a small set
Suppose that I give you a set of reference strings (“ftp”, “file”, “http”, “https”, “ws”, “wss”). Given a new string, you want to quickly tell whether it is part...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 25 2022)
One of Elon Musk’s ventures, OpenAI, made public a new tool called ChatGPT. It is widely regarding as a practical breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Given...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast base16 encoding
Given binary data, we often need to encode it as ASCII text. Email and much of the web effectively works in this manner. A popular format for this purpose is base64...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The size of things in bytes
storing 1 GiB/month on the cloud 0.02$US web site of my twitter profile (@lemire), HTML alone 296 KiB web site of my twitter profile (@lemire), all data 3.9 MiB...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Checking for the absence of a string, naive AVX-512 edition
Suppose you would like to check that a string is not present in a large document. In C, you might do the following using the standard function strstr: bool is_present...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is the memory usage of a small array in C++?
In an earlier blog post, I reported that the memory usage of a small byte array in Java (e.g., an array containing 4 bytes) was about 24 bytes. In other words:Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 11 2022)
As we focus on some types of unfortunate discrimination (race, gender), we may become blind to other types of discrimination. For example, tend to discrimate against...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog