Experienced devs may want to skip the intro or jump immediately to the conclusions. The backbone of many foundational software systems — from compilers and interpreters to math libraries, operating systems, and database management systems — is often implemented in C and C++. These systems frequently offer Software Development Kits (SDKs) for high-level languages like Python, JavaScript, GoLang, C#, Java, and Rust, enabling broader accessibility. But there is a catch.| ashvardanian.com
In this fourth article of the “Less Slow” series, I’m accelerating Unum’s open-source Vector Search primitives used by some great database and cloud providers to replace Meta’s FAISS and scale-up search in their products. This time, our focus is on the most frequent operation for these tasks - computing the the Cosine Similarity/Distance between two vectors. It’s so common, even doubling it’s performance can have a noticeable impact on applications economics.| ashvardanian.com
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. – Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++. Very few consider C++ attractive, and only some people think it’s easy. Choosing it for a project generally means you care about the performance of your code. And rightly so! Today, machines can process hundreds of Gigabytes per second, and we, as developers, should all learn to saturate those capabilities.| ashvardanian.com
