this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
494 points (97.3% liked)

Programmer Humor

26390 readers
1774 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Did you ever saw a char and thought: "Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient"? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5 bytes. The reason this works is, because one unsigned int is a ten digit long number and so I can save one char using 2 digits. In theory you could save 32 different chars using this technique (the first two digits of an unsigned int are 42 and if you dont want to account for a possible 0 in the beginning you end up with 32 chars). If you would decide to use all 10 digits you could save exactly 3 chars. Why should anyone do that? Idk. Is it way to much work to be useful? Yes. Was it funny? Yes.

Anyone whos interested in the code: Heres how I did it in C: https://pastebin.com/hDeHijX6

Yes I know, the code is probably bad, but I do not care. It was just a funny useless idea I had.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 5 points 1 week ago

My colleague said he didn’t see the point in storing enums as shorts or bytes instead of a full word, so I retaliated by storing them in their string form instead, arguing that it’ll be compressed by the db engine.

[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I mean… you’d get better results for large data sets by just using a known compression algorithm. This is only viable for situations where you only have a small amount of data, enough computation to run this conditional, but not enough computation to run compression/decompression.

[–] dullbananas@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

That's bootleg gzip.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

And here I was wasting time with bit fields to make my bools smaller.

[–] HyperfocusSurfer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Mostly because compilers do this kind of stuff if you optimize for space, iirc. Not that you should never do it or something, but it kinda looks like premature optimization to me.

Idk, I just had this funny idea, and thought I could do this as a cool and quick proof of example

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm a simple man. Here's my list of variable names:

Var1

Var2

Var3

Var4

Var5

...

[–] Zacryon@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago

At first I thought, "How are they going to compress 256 values, i.e. 1 Byte sized data, by "rearranging into integers"?

Then I saw your code and realized you are discarding 228 of them, effectively reducing the available symbol set by about 89%.

Speaking of efficiency: Since chars are essentially unsigned integers of size 1 byte and 'a' to 'z' are values 97 to 122 (decimal, both including) you can greatly simplify your turn_char_to_int method by just substracting 87 from each symbol to get them into your desired value range instead of using this cumbersome switch-case structure. Space (32) and dot (46) would still need special handling though to fit your desired range.

Bit-encoding your chosen 28 values directly would require 5 bit.

[–] UnPassive@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I have a coworker who does stuff like this and it's always low-benefit optimizations that cost the team time to interface with - but I do still kind of love it

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

C lets you do this by putting text in single quotes:

int foo = 'Abcd';

works

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] python@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Hey, this is awesome for saving space when writing things to NFC tags! Every bit still matters with those suckers

[–] bonus_crab@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

now use the intchar to store prefixes for a smart string , or pack them to make a simd optimized b tree with 40 string prefixes per node instead of 32

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Use strings for everything and use a single universal method to convert some to floats only when you absolutely have to.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›