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A comment on A Fast x86 Implementation of Select (2017) [pdf].

Re:A Fast x86 Implementation of Select (2017) [pdf] by ot on Sunday October 14, 2018 @01:15AM (#18211482)
The authors claim their algorithm is novel, but it actually had been a well known folklore technique for quite a while. For example it was used in Folly as early as Jan 2016:

https://github.com/facebook/folly/commit/b28186247104f8b90cf...

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Re:A Fast x86 Implementation of Select (2017) [pdf] by stephencanon on Sunday October 14, 2018 @03:29AM (#18211786)
Yeah, I definitely saw this technique in Intel sample code demonstrating use of BMI before HSW was released. Probably 2011, maybe 2012.

That said, we worry too much about who the first person to have an idea was. Any idea worth having is come upon independently by many people, and putting the idea to work and communicating it to others are more valuable contributions anyway.

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