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A comment on Sentinels Can Be Faster. Parent comment

Re:Sentinels Can Be Faster by dundarious on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @04:19PM (#24425459)
See Alexandrescu’s Fastware talk on how amazingly sentinels can improve even textbook algorithms, and how to apply the approach intelligently. E.g., for a linear search, overwrite the last element with the sought after value, and do a tiny bit of work to make that safe and to undo it before return.

If you’re skeptical, I really do encourage you to watch, he’s not sloppy.

https://youtu.be/AxnotgLql0k

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Re:Sentinels Can Be Faster by bjoli on Thursday September 10, 2020 @04:24AM (#24430098)
This brings back memories! I discovered the same thing in high school in a programming class. We had a speed-golfing assignment and in the end my program ended up quite a bit faster than the "golden reference" our teacher had. He refused to believe I had come up with it myself (though I got the highest grade on the assignment).

This was back when we could assume 8-bit encodings(iso 8859-1 was the one we used). Simpler times!

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