A Programmer's First Foray into Assembly: Optimizing a Lexer with Bit Vectors
2024-12-25
After reading "Writing an Interpreter in Go," a programmer attempted a rewrite in Zig and Rust, focusing on optimizing lexer performance. He explored several methods: branching, lookup tables, and bit vectors. Bit vectors compress state representation by mapping ASCII characters to bits, reducing memory usage and improving lookup efficiency. While an attempt to utilize SIMD instructions failed, he successfully implemented bit vectors in Zig and achieved good results in benchmarks, gaining valuable experience in assembly programming and performance optimization.