Re: Decimal: Formal review begins

From: Christian Mazakas (christian.mazakas_at_[hidden])
Date: 2025-01-20 22:15:55

On Mon, Jan 20, 2025 at 1:48 PM Ivan Matek <libbooze_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> I have a fear this discussion is gonna go offtopic, but I do think it is
> important to remember that Hash2 was designed as framework for "binding"
> user types with algorithms, with some default implementations of
> algorithms.
> So although I was not delighted it is much slower than alternatives there
> it was much less problematic.
>
> As for Unordered: My history knowledge is bad, but was not Unordered the
> library that originally inspired C++11 unordered_map?
> *First Release 1.36.0*
> Are you talking about speed compared to antique Google hash map
> implementations like google::dense_hash_map and google::sparse_hash_map?
>

Ha ha, in my opinion, it's not a good Boost review without going incredibly
off-topic and waxing philosophical.

My point was, there could've been a strong case to be made against the
library for not being as fast as C libraries that have had like a decade
and half of optimizations.

I am happy to hear that you didn't think it was problematic, however. I
love software engineering in terms of goals and there's a lot of cool stuff
to be done in the hashing space and we're always trying to make it faster.

 I was referring to comparisons with the absl::flat_hash_map or any other
Swiss Tables implementation. One of these days, I intend to actually write
a benchmark comparing Rust's tables as well, because they also use Swiss
Tables.

I guess my point was, libraries are temporal things and they very rarely
stay the same as the library that was reviewed. That's why I think that
even though performance obviously matters, I'm hesitant to make it a
criteria for acceptance. But others may feel differently, which is the
whole point of Boost review.

- Christian