[glangdale]

Can confirm this eerie ability of FPGA and h/w folks from another domain (regular expressions - I'm the designer of Hyperscan, a s/w solution).

Every corner case that could be found in s/w was always the topic of a excited benchmark. Also, the old trick of 'hey, let's drop all the matches on the floor in our h/w or FPGA, while getting a huge number of matches in s/w and making the s/w guys look ridiculous'.

Every time I read a paper touting a great new speedup on FPGA (over some crap s/w implementation) I'm reminded of that old joke about the Texan visiting Israel and telling the owner of some small farm that "he can get on a tractor and ride for days without getting the the boundary of his property." The Israeli nods sympathetically and says "Yes, I too used to have a tractor like that".

[rjeli]

I don’t understand the joke?

[nfriedly]

I think the Texan is thinking of a regular tractor on a huge farm, while the Israeli is thinking of a slow/broken tractor on a moderately sized farm.

[namibj]

I found https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uj2ot/a_texas_ranch... And it seems to be not that good of a joke.