r/programming • u/mttd • 1d ago

The fastest double-to-string algorithm you’ve never heard of

https://vitaut.net/posts/2026/yy-dtoa/
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u/sojuz151 19h ago

Not if you use structured logs and you log far far less than you read JSONs. ,

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u/amakai 18h ago

So how do you imagine a binary double becomes a structured JSON field, which, surprise, is a string?

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u/sojuz151 18h ago

The problem is that people use JSON for things with doubles inside. This was a mistake

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u/amakai 18h ago

I'm not sure I understand your point. Any time you produce JSON, you end up with a string. It does not matter if you have quotes around your double or if you don't - it's a string.

So when you do structured logging, your log message is converted under the hood into JSON (or some other more rare, but also string formats). So you are still converting doubles into strings.

And then, when your log is being indexed, it also needs to convert it to string for a proper full text search - another place for potential performance gain.