[Jabbles]

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?

[ramisayar]

They use facebook ids everywhere which are integers represented as strings.

[mappu]

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.

[zem]

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)

[Negitivefrags]

Perhaps they are referring to HTTP? The GET and POST params come in as strings.