A response to the blog post "{n} times faster than C". Our final program achieved a speedup of 128x (36 GiB/s throughput) by reformulating the problem and leveraging SIMD intrinsics.
The original post made a valid point. This one makes a point as well, but representing it as “128x faster than C” is plain clickbait.
It’s not comparing the same type of program. If it used intrinsics in C (they exist, it’s where most other languages leverage their intrinsic support from), or even turned on GCC or LLVM auto vectorization to compare performance, I’d be willing to let it go, but right now it’s just misrepresenting reality in that title.
We don’t need this kind of hyperbole or clickbait. We’re better than that as a community. I don’t mean this as “article bad! author bad!”, this article is useful, but it would be much better of titled something like “Speeding up string search 128x by using SIMD intrinsics in Rust”, which gets the point across and the 128x number would still attract enough attention, but for the right reasons.
The original post made a valid point. This one makes a point as well, but representing it as “128x faster than C” is plain clickbait.
It’s not comparing the same type of program. If it used intrinsics in C (they exist, it’s where most other languages leverage their intrinsic support from), or even turned on GCC or LLVM auto vectorization to compare performance, I’d be willing to let it go, but right now it’s just misrepresenting reality in that title.
We don’t need this kind of hyperbole or clickbait. We’re better than that as a community. I don’t mean this as “article bad! author bad!”, this article is useful, but it would be much better of titled something like “Speeding up string search 128x by using SIMD intrinsics in Rust”, which gets the point across and the 128x number would still attract enough attention, but for the right reasons.
I updated the title of this post, as per your suggestion