[amelius]

Decimal strings are for human consumption, I suppose. Not sure if the nanosecond timescale is relevant then (unless you send these numbers to billions of people which is unlikely). Sounds like a pointless exercise, or maybe they should have picked a better example.

[pipe2devnull]

Wow that’s a bit harsh. You can’t think of any examples where you may need to send a string to something but want to do it quickly?

[amelius]

Yeah maybe a bit harsh. But the point is if you are looking for that kind of performance, I don't see why you wouldn't send binary data and then unpack it as needed.

[appreciatorBus]

If you control both ends of the pipe, then sure. But for better or worse, large chunks of infrastructure expect to send or receive JSON.

[__s]

csv/tsv are alive & well for interorg data pipelines

[amelius]

But JSON uses floats, not integers.

[bee_rider]

Does it really? I assumed it used strings.

[Shish2k]

javascript uses floats as its own default numeric data type; but other languages do have integers, and might want to convert those integers into a JSON (string) representation

[DarkUranium]

Because maybe the choice of serialization format isn't under your control?

[bee_rider]

I do sort of agree that, at some point, there arrives a question of “are we sure we need to convert the ints to strings?” But it also serves as a convenient excuse to write fast AVX-512 code (practice and show off tricks if nothing else), the objective is immediately obvious (no need for intense numerical proofs). I like it.

[whiatp]

Many large distributed systems are built around pushing data through web requests, and human readable request/response formats (JSON, XML) are the most popular, and require integer to string conversions for serialization.

[analog31]

I can imagine a time in the near future when the conversion of integers to decimal strings becomes a limit to the rate at which AI can generate text that's not worth reading.

[teo_zero]

You assume that human consumption means immediate human consumption.

By this metric, there's no need for video encoders faster than the movie's own FPS, either.