There is something odd about seeing the world's greatest software engineers show off their new string_to_int function.
Why are so many conversions needed? "they have many protocols that store ints as strings" why?
They use facebook ids everywhere which are integers represented as strings.
I guess with HTTP, every get/post/cookie parameter is a string... they might have found it was less expensive to simply not convert them.
i found it pretty inspiring. not only was it a neat example of coding with instruction-level parallelism in mind, but a concrete demonstration that it did indeed provide significant speedups in a piece of code that people have been using for decades (and which had presumably already been optimised for the single-everything cpu case)
Perhaps they are referring to HTTP? The GET and POST params come in as strings.
The dynamic class is a cool idea, i'm glad it's faster for their use case, and it's nice to have canonical implementations of format and json_parse. Aside from that, seems pretty unnoteworthy - Does this fit into HipHop, or do Facebook have another large C++ project?