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There is something odd about seeing the world's greatest software engineers show off their new string_to_int function.

Why are so many conversions needed? "they have many protocols that store ints as strings" why?

They use facebook ids everywhere which are integers represented as strings.
Perhaps they are referring to HTTP? The GET and POST params come in as strings.
I guess with HTTP, every get/post/cookie parameter is a string... they might have found it was less expensive to simply not convert them.
i found it pretty inspiring. not only was it a neat example of coding with instruction-level parallelism in mind, but a concrete demonstration that it did indeed provide significant speedups in a piece of code that people have been using for decades (and which had presumably already been optimised for the single-everything cpu case)
The dynamic class is a cool idea, i'm glad it's faster for their use case, and it's nice to have canonical implementations of format and json_parse. Aside from that, seems pretty unnoteworthy - Does this fit into HipHop, or do Facebook have another large C++ project?