Modern processors have instructions to process several bytes at once. Effectively all processors have the capability of processing 16 bytes one once. These instructions are called SIMD, for single instruction, multiple data. It was once an open question whether these instructions could be useful to accelerate common tasks such as parsing HTML or JSON....

In software, we often represent strings by surrounding them with quotes ("). What happens if the string itself contains quotes? We then need to escape the string. For example, the quote character (") or the backlash character (\) should be replaced by \" or \\. Most programmers are familiar with this process. Most strings do not need to be escaped....

In the quest for software optimization, a trusty companion is the sampling profiler, a tool available in most programming languages. These profilers work unobtrusively, taking snapshots of the program’s state and recording the currently executing function or instruction. While profilers sound like a silver bullet for identifying performance bottlenecks,...

Artificial intelligence is far more efficient at producing content than human beings, as far as carbon emissions go. Human brains got larger by over 5% between 1930 and 1970. Replacing plastics by ‘environment friendly’ alternatives typically results in greater greenhouse gas emissions. Prostate-specific antigen screening has only a small effect...

Back when I started programming professionally, every expert and every software engineering professor would swear by object-oriented programming. Resistance was futile. History had spoken: the future was object-oriented. It is hard to understate how strong the mania was. In education, we started calling textbooks and videos ‘learning objects‘. Educators...

In C++, there are different ways to pass a value to a function. Typically, at any given time, an object in C++ ‘belongs’ to a single function. The various ways to call a function differ in who owns the object, the caller or the callee (the function being called). The simplest one is that we pass by value. In such cases, a copy is typically made of...