simdjson author: open source is a research method — demand comes before papers
lemire · x · 2026-11-04
Daniel Lemire's article "Open source as a research method" pushes back on the linear view of innovation (professor publishes, engineer products, customer consumes). The industrial revolution was driven by demand for cheap clothing, not papers.
He cites Michael Stonebraker's 2018 "Where We Have Failed": database research lost its real-world customers and drifted. Lemire's own simdjson illustrates the alternative — in 2019 JSON parsing ran at a few hundred MB/s, so they built the library first; it now parses at 4.8 GB/s on twitter.json on a recent Intel Xeon. Solve real problems first, open source the result.
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