Simon Willison benchmarked four implementations of a parse_number() SQLite extension in C vs Rust, finding an optimized custom C parser at 19 ns/row—about twice as fast as Rust versions. All implementations passed 8 million fuzz checks, while plain C's reliance on strtod() made it slower on decimal-heavy data.
Background
Willison explored whether writing a custom SQLite extension in C or Rust would be more performant for parsing formatted numeric strings like currency values.
- Source
- Simon Willison
- Published
- Nov 9, 2026 at 06:26 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10