this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Programmer Humor

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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.

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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was hopping it was somehow badly implemented in python and each char ended up occupying 2Gb

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Hmmmmmmm, that sounds like another fun idea. Trying to make storing a single char as inefficient as possible.

[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Could you spawn a container to run the function that packs the char?

You’re gonna need an entire ansible infrastructure to stand up the host that runs the podman container too.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Don't forget to make a C interface for that Python library, so that it can be used in Kernel code.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 0 points 17 hours ago

Its already written in C1