Comment by bigiain
4 years ago
I wonder if there's anyone on earth who needs nicely formatted human readable file sizes that's worried about the difference between one or two cpu cycle branching instructions?
There might be a few guys at FAANG who have a planet-scale use case for human readable file sizes. But surely "performance optimising" this is _purely_ code golf geekiness?
(Which is a perfectly valid reason to do it, but I'm gonna choose the most obvious to the next progerammer reading it version over one that 50% or 500% or 5000% fast in almost any use case I can think I'm like to need this... I mean, it's only looking for 6 prefixes "KMGTPE" a six line case statement would work for most people?)
Actually, I just realised. This is (probably a small part of) why "calculate all sizes" in Mac finder windows is so slow. I already mentioned Apple in FAANG, but I guess someone at Microsoft and people who work on Linux file brokers care too. And whoever maintains the -h flag codepaths in all the Unix-like utils that support it?
Confused what this has to do with calculating file sizes. Time spent computing file sizes is dwarfed by I/O, right?