1brc VS avo

This would be the code to beat. Ideally with only 8 cores but any number of cores is also very interesting.

https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc/discussions/710

Given that 1-billion-line-file is approximately 13GB, instead of providing a fixed database, the official repository offers a script to generate synthetic data with random readings. Just follow the instructions to create your own database.

Local disk I/O is no longer the bottleneck on modern systems: https://benhoyt.com/writings/io-is-no-longer-the-bottleneck/

In addition, the official 1BRC explicitly evaluated results on a RAM disk to avoid I/O speed entirely: https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc?tab=readme-ov-file#eva... "Programs are run from a RAM disk (i.o. the IO overhead for loading the file from disk is not relevant)"

You may have heard of the "The One Billion Row Challenge" (1brc) and in case you don't, go checkout Gunnar Morlings's 1brc repo.

Here’s a thread on results with duckdb, I don’t mean to discourage you taking a shot at all though: https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc/discussions/39

If you are in “javaland” look at billion row challenge, you will learn a lot - https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc

Even manual vectorization is pain...writing ASM, really?

Rust has unstable portable SIMD and a few third-party crates, C++ has that as well, C# has stable portable SIMD and a very small BLAS-like library on top of it (hell it even exercises PackedSIMD when ran in a browser) and Java is getting stable Panama vectors some time in the future (though the question of codegen quality stands open given planned changes to unsafe API).

Go among these is uniquely disadvantaged. And if that's not enough, you may want to visit 1Brc's challenge discussions and see that Go struggles get anywhere close to 2s mark with both C# and C++ are blazing past it:

https://hotforknowledge.com/2024/01/13/1brc-in-dotnet-among-...

https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc/discussions/67

In terms of performance: I realize that this is a somewhat "toy" issue, and it's a sample size of 1, but for the currently ongoing "One Billion Row Challenge"[1] (an ongoing Java performance competition related to parsing and aggregating a 13 GB file), all of the current top-performers are using Unsafe. More specifically, the use of Unsafe appears to have been the change for a few entries that allowed getting below the 3-second barrier in the test.

1. https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc

I wonder whether avo could have been useful here?[1] I mention it because it came up the last time we were talking about AVX operations in go.[2]

1 = https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo

2 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34465297

I thought the /r/golang comments on this post were pretty useful[1]. They also introduced me to avo[2], a tool for generating x86 assembly from go that I hadn't seen before. There are some examples listed on the avo github page for generating AVX512 instructions with avo.

1 = https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/10hmh07/how_to_use_...

2 = https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo

For writing AVX512 from scratch avo is a much better alternative.

Avo is a library that simplifies writing complex go assembly, I found it very useful to figure out how instructions map onto Go's asm syntax. But you could definitely do the translation directly, it's what c2goasm did (couldn't get it to work reliably unfortunately).

Curious if you're looking at using avo to write the assembly

You can use github.com/mmcloughlin/avo for generating the assembly use Go.

For normal and "better" mode I am using avo to generate different encoders for different input sizes, with and without Snappy compatibility. That currently outputs about 17k lines of assembly.

You could perhaps just have the Go compiler generate the assembler for your code:

go tool compile -S file.go > file_amd64.s

Then you could verify it doesn't change over time, and choose to begin maintaining by hand if it makes sense.

If you do want to go the route of rolling it yourself, I'd suggest looking into something like Avo: https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo

If you have to go with Assembly, try Avo https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo