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How I accidently created the fastest CSV parser ever made
2025-09-07 08:24 PM • 31 min read • #cpu #c #csv #perfs This project started as a fun experiment 2months ago and still evolving... therefore, i don't necessarily 100% recommend it as a must-use tool for now, as it may have its own flaws.
The goal: to create a CSV parser that treated the CPU not like a simple calculator, but like the parallel-processing monster it truly is... and then wrap that power in a Node.js library to see if native speed could obliterate the performance of existing JavaScript solutions. At its heart, a CSV Parser is the valiant program that reads Comma-Separated Values files, embarking on the perilous quest to navigate a minefield of commas, newlines, and escaped quotes to transform plain text into structured rows and fields. As brilliantly explained by Aarol in their Zig SIMD substring search article, the key insight is that modern CPUs can perform the same operation on multiple data elements in parallel using vector registers.
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