There is something odd about seeing the world's greatest software engineers show off their new string_to_int function.

Why are so many conversions needed? "they have many protocols that store ints as strings" why?

They use facebook ids everywhere which are integers represented as strings.

I guess with HTTP, every get/post/cookie parameter is a string... they might have found it was less expensive to simply not convert them.

i found it pretty inspiring. not only was it a neat example of coding with instruction-level parallelism in mind, but a concrete demonstration that it did indeed provide significant speedups in a piece of code that people have been using for decades (and which had presumably already been optimised for the single-everything cpu case)

Perhaps they are referring to HTTP? The GET and POST params come in as strings.

more useful than live blogging https://github.com/boostcon/cppnow_presentations_2012

The dynamic class is a cool idea, i'm glad it's faster for their use case, and it's nice to have canonical implementations of format and json_parse. Aside from that, seems pretty unnoteworthy - Does this fit into HipHop, or do Facebook have another large C++ project?

This all fits into Folly: The Facebook Open Source Library. https://github.com/facebook/folly