After literally years of false starts and failed attempts, last week I finally checked in a series of patches that speed up GDB’s DWARF reader. The speedup for ordinary C++ code is dramatic — I regularly see a 7x performance improvement. For example, on this machine, startup on gdb itself drops from 2.2 seconds to…

In the previous article, we designed and implemented static B-trees to speed up binary searching in sorted arrays. In its last section, we briefly discussed how to make them dynamic back while retaining the performance gains from SIMD and validated our predictions by adding and following explicit pointers in the internal nodes of the S+…