I was on the program committee for swiftCon and got excited about @bens’s talk on the billion row challenge in Swift when it was just an abstract. So cool to see it in person.

Super nerdy optimizations all the way down. mmap and multithreading eventually, but my favourite part was swapping out Swift’s standard types for raw bytes and unsafe pointers 👩🏻‍💻

For those not at the event, he did a whole NSScreencast series on it: https://nsscreencast.com/episodes/604-brc-part1