Comment by addoo
2 days ago
I appreciate this article a lot more because it contains an iota of benchmarking with an explanation about why this might be more performant. Especially since my first thought was 'wouldn't this require more instructions to be executed?'
The original post seems really weird to me. I would have dismissed it as someone's hobby project, but... that doesn't seem like what it's trying to be.
"More instructions to execute" is not synonymous with "slower".
NaNboxing lets you use less memory on certain use cases. Because memory access is slow and caches are fixed size, this is usually a performance win, even if you have to do a few extra ops on every access.
I mean, a modern computer is operating the gigahertz range. Adding a few extra bitwise instructions might be something like a nanosecond. Which is absolutely fleeting compared to memory operations.
It's a joke project.