That's bootleg gzip.
It is neither useless nor funny. It's optimization for storage capacity. If everyone in the world put in that level of effort into compression, computer storage and processing would actually be faster than the previous generation.
Unless you only copy and compare you have to decode it, or implement more complicated logic for everything from searching to concatenation (which is normally just memcopy).
This will actually run much slower. It saves space, but it has to do a bunch of math every time it needs to store or load a string I stead of just outputting it. Maybe if you had really limited cache space this could run faster (since it could save on fetching from RAM/storage), but, unless you're storing some really long strings, it won't make a difference.
I mean… you’d get better results for large data sets by just using a known compression algorithm. This is only viable for situations where you only have a small amount of data, enough computation to run this conditional, but not enough computation to run compression/decompression.
My colleague said he didn’t see the point in storing enums as shorts or bytes instead of a full word, so I retaliated by storing them in their string form instead, arguing that it’ll be compressed by the db engine.
And here I was wasting time with bit fields to make my bools smaller.
At first I thought, "How are they going to compress 256 values, i.e. 1 Byte sized data, by "rearranging into integers"?
Then I saw your code and realized you are discarding 228 of them, effectively reducing the available symbol set by about 89%.
Speaking of efficiency: Since chars are essentially unsigned integers of size 1 byte and 'a' to 'z' are values 97 to 122 (decimal, both including) you can greatly simplify your turn_char_to_int
method by just substracting 87 from each symbol to get them into your desired value range instead of using this cumbersome switch-case structure. Space (32) and dot (46) would still need special handling though to fit your desired range.
Bit-encoding your chosen 28 values directly would require 5 bit.
C lets you do this by putting text in single quotes:
int foo = 'Abcd';
works
Hey, this is awesome for saving space when writing things to NFC tags! Every bit still matters with those suckers
I have a coworker who does stuff like this and it's always low-benefit optimizations that cost the team time to interface with - but I do still kind of love it
now use the intchar to store prefixes for a smart string , or pack them to make a simd optimized b tree with 40 string prefixes per node instead of 32
in the same vein (storing more data in less bits) you should check out tagged pointers as well!
I don't think that's a useless implementation at all. code looks relatively clean, and it definitely has its uses in the embedded systems world.
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