Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,020 posts.

Software Engineering
576

Branchless Coding in Go

So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…

592

Fast CSV Processing with SIMD

I recently learned of csvquote , a tool that encodes troublesome CSV characters such that unix tools can correctly process them. It reverses the encoding at the end of the pipeline, recovering the original input. The original implementation handles CSV quotes using the straightforward, naive method. However, there’s a…