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.
I'm not sure if this is the right setting for technical discussion, but as a relative elder of computing I'd like to answer the question in the image earnestly. There's a few factors squeezing the practicality out of this for almost all applications: processor architectures (like all of them these days) make operating on packed characters take more operations than 8 bit characters so there's a speed tradeoff (especially considering cache and pipelining). Computers these days are built to handle extremely memory demanding video and 3d workloads and memory usage of text data is basically a blip in comparison. When it comes to actual storage and not in-memory representation, compression algorithms typically perform better than just packing each character into fewer bits. You'd need to be in a pretty specific niche for this technique to come in handy again, for better or for worse
I liked the technical discussion so thank you. Keep it up, I got into this career because there was always so much to learn.
This is 100% true. I never plan on actually using this. It might be useful for working on microcontrollers like an ESP32, but apart from that the trade of for more computational power is not worth the memory savings.
Having seen many of Kaze's videos on N64 development, I've learned that the N64 has like 4x the processing power it needs compared to its memory. In hardware cases like that the trade-off of computational power and memory memory savings gets you some nice performance gains.
There is still fun to be had! Just... Different fun!
In database land lookup tables are pretty common. Prefix tries and the like are super common in search land. I've seen GCD, offset, delta-of-delta, and some funky bitwise floating point compression used. Sometimes just to save dist space. But usually to save working set space or IO or S3 cache space.
And squeezing the most out of modern CPUs is its own art. Compilers are glorious. And modern CPUs are magic lightning rocks. But you can learn to sing to them just right to make them all happy.