Comparing strtod with from_chars (GCC 12)

A reader (Richard Ebeling) invited me to revisit an older blog post: Parsing floats in C++: benchmarking strtod vs. from_chars. Back then I reported that switching from strtod to from_chars in C++ to parse numbers could lead to a speed increase (by 20%). The code is much the same, we go from…

char * string = "3.1416";
char * string_end = string;
double x = strtod(string, &string_end);
if(string_end == string) { 
  //you have an error!
}

… to something more modern in C++17…

std::string st = "3.1416";
double x; 
auto [p, ec] = std::from_chars(st.data(), st.data() + st.size(), x);
if (p == st.data()) {
      //you have errors!
}

Back when I first reported on this result, only Visual Studio had support for from_chars. The C++ library in GCC 12 now has full support for from_chars. Let us run the benchmark again:

strtod	270 MB/s
from_chars	1 GB/s

So it is almost four times faster! The benchmark reads random values in the [0,1] interval.

Internally, GCC 12 adopted the fast_float library.

Further reading: Number Parsing at a Gigabyte per Second, Software: Pratice and Experience 51 (8), 2021.