How much of an improvement does SIMD offer for something like this? It looks lik... | Hacker News

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		tuveson 8 months ago \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Strategies for Fast Lexers How much of an improvement does SIMD offer for something like this? It looks like it's only being used for strings and comments, but I would kind of assume that for most programming languages, the proportion of code that is long strings / comments is not large. Also curious if there's any performance penalty for trying to do SIMD if most of the comments and strings are short.

Sesse__ 8 months ago | [–]

Random data point: Implementing SIMD for tokenizing identifiers sped up the Chromium CSS parser (as a whole, not just the tokenizer) by ~2–3%.

camel-cdr 8 months ago | [–]

Usually lexing isn't part of the performance equation compared to all other parts of the compiler, but SIMD can be used to speedup the number parsing.

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