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How long did this take?

It took about 2 days to get a proof of concept, and about a week to get something I could ship to production.

I skipped a few features for the PoC (like XML tag support, token positions), so most of the delta was adding those back in!

If you didn’t need to look at the code at all, why not write it in asm instead of Rust, and make it even faster?

Ha I did consider that! But 70x is plenty fast enough (we still have to query an actual database!) and the parser runs in a shared process on untrusted input, so it wasn't worth the security risk

This is a good point.

If we don't care about inspecting the output, why don't we just replace the Rust compiler with something that generates assembly from Rust source, and then cross check the output with a few million random Rust programs?

About 1/1000 of the duration of their interview process where they gloat about wasting your time.

Surprised anyone gets an interview there. My resume matched the job requirements pretty much exactly with 11yoe and I got an auto rejection mail at 1am.

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