SIMD fixes malformed UTF-16 strings up to 9x faster, already in Chromium and Node 25
lemire · x · 2026-08-26
A new paper by lemire et al.: fixing ill-formed UTF-16 strings (unpaired surrogates replaced by U+FFFD, as JavaScript and Java store strings) using SIMD — ARM NEON and x64 SSE/AVX2/AVX-512. It hits 18.9 GB/s on an Apple M4 and 7.5 GB/s on Intel Ice Lake, at as little as 0.4 instructions per byte, up to 9x faster than the old approach. Shipped in practice: String.prototype.toWellFormed in Node.js 25 is 5x faster, and the code is in Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave); a browser benchmark is linked.
Related event: SIMD Repairs Malformed UTF-16 Strings 9x Faster(2 posts)→
More from Research
- Robotics papers on arXiv have grown ~6x in five years, peaking at 676 in a single week — Rewkang · 2026-10-15
- MicroSDF: microfacet-driven neural SDFs for mixed-reflectance 3D reconstruction — ssh4net · 2026-10-15
- 'Thinking leakage': no-think RL gains in hybrid models just reuse think-mode skills — kaust-generative-ai · 2026-10-15
- COMPASS predicts model-pair compatibility before alignment or merging — epfl-ch · 2026-10-15
- BERT tokenizer gets 50x speedup by skipping text normalization, not optimizing it — LysandreJik · 2026-10-15
- LLM agents autonomously design a SAR ADC on SKY130 from schematic to signoff, paper finds — IgorCarron · 2026-10-15