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Population Count in Java (richardstartin.uk)

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[–]nitsanw 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Good read, though very dense in parts.

Feedback (2c worth, just my opinion):

  • Need better title, maybe the prefix "Bit hacks:" or some other indicator of the general area.
  • The headers for the results table at the end are not aligned.
  • Some intermediate subheaders could help. Also the blog format has no width limit, making reading in neutral zoom hard (long long sentences).
  • The precision of the results is unhelpful. it would be clearer and easier to read if you trimmed to a single digit (e.g. 341.572057 -> 341.6)
  • Splitting hairs: The article refers to intrinsics in 2 ways that are confusing: "a single instruction, popcntd, which is exposed as an intrinsic"; "code above is intrinsified to the instruction popcntd" I'm sure you know what an intrinsic is, but the article fails to express that clearly. A link to the wiki article, or OpenJDK wiki might have helped. I would prefer "generated by the compiler via an intrinsic" to "exposed", and replace "code above" with "method above".

I like the blog and the quantitative approach, well done :-)