Possibly faster fread via fast_float
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 28/100
- Issue type
- Feature
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Activity status
- Stale
- Domain
- data, performance
Research direction
Start by locating fread's ASCII-to-float conversion and reviewing the linked fast_float paper and library. Compare the approaches and benchmark whether fast_float provides a meaningful improvement; done means establishing whether it is faster and whether its Apache license permits vendoring.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Daniel @Lemire has another paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11408) and library (https://github.com/fastfloat/fast_float) out which speeds up conversion from ascii to float ("4x over strtod"):
Apparently Arrow already uses it, as does ClickHouse (which is also a performance hound):
It is C++, but Apache license so you could possibly vendor it if it turns that it offers a leg up over your code in fread. Feel free to close this if it is old news to you.
- Dominant language
- R
- Stars
- 3.9k
- Forks
- 1.1k
- Avg merge
- 14h 4m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 4
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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