SevorisSo yesterday I stumbled across these two articles about finite state transducers and what they are useful for and *goddamn* sometimes I love algorithms. There's moments when algorithm theory really becomes useful in of itself:
with further reference to:
https://burntsushi.net/transducers/#the-fst-library
(I learned about FTS as a computational linguist tool. That they make for efficient indices over prefix and suffix matches or fuzzy matches with edit distance I didn't know until yesterday)
Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary
Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.”