I was out walking the dog when I got curious about how easy/difficult it would be to write a SQLite C extension that adds a parse_number() function for turning strings like -$1,234.56 or '12.5%' into numeric values that could be summed and sorted.
I'm thinking about a SQLite custom function 'parse_number(value)' that strips ',', '$', '£' and '%', handles a leading '-', and returns 'NULL' for anything it can’t parse
Explore the difference between building this as a SQLite extension in C v.s. in Rust – I want to compare performance and code complexity and size of the resulting.so(or whatever) file
This gave me a solid starting point – the Rust extension was 321 KB (using Rusqlite) and 298 KB (using sqlite-loadable-rs), while the C extension was 14 KB. But the Rust extension was faster!
Source: Simon Willison — Read the full article on the original site ↗