Together with @MarkReedZ we've added basic GoLang bindings to StringZilla, which look surprisingly fast compared to native GoLang strings. We currently use the new cGo annotations available in Go 1.24:
Cgo has gained new capabilities in Go 1.24, supporting new C function annotations to improve runtime performance. Among them,
#cgo noescape cFunctionNameis used to inform the compiler that the memory passed tocFunctionnamewill not escape;#cgo nocallback cFunctionNameindicates that this C function will not call back any Go functions. In addition, Cgo's inspection of multiple incompatible declarations of C functions has become more stringent. When there are incompatible declarations in different files, errors can be detected and reported more timely and accurately.
I was using an Intel Sapphire Rapids machine on AWS for preliminary testing and benchmarking. I've precompiled StringZilla with dynamic dispatch enabled, linked to the thin GoLang binding layer:
$ ~/StringZilla/golang$ CGO_CFLAGS="-I$(pwd)/../include" \
CGO_LDFLAGS="-L$(pwd)/../build_golang -lstringzilla_shared" \
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(pwd)/../build_golang:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" \
go run ../scripts/bench.go --input ../leipzig1M.txt --split lines --seed 42... and compared to native GoLang strings on some key operations:
Benchmarking on `../leipzig1M.txt` with seed 42.
Total input length: 129644797
Total lines: 1000000
Average line length: 128.64
Running benchmark using `testing.Benchmark`.
strings.Contains : 309 3818144 ns/op
sz.Contains : 664 1881251 ns/op
strings.Index : 325 3669081 ns/op
sz.Index : 624 1990093 ns/op
strings.LastIndex : 12 85201713 ns/op
sz.LastIndex : 494 2306318 ns/op
strings.IndexAny : 6321228 181.0 ns/op
sz.IndexAny : 10608960 112.6 ns/op
strings.Count : 156 8015292 ns/op
sz.Count (non-overlap) : 285 4206698 ns/op
sz.Count (overlap) : 284 4204370 ns/opSo if you are processing a lot of text in Go, try doing so with StringZilla and stay tuned for the upcoming 4.0 release #201 🥳