4 Billion If Statements | Prime Reacts 

programmers in 1969: send a spaceship to the moon with only 4KB of RAM programmers in 2024: i need 30GB to check if a number is even or odd

Dynamic meta programming optimization - Take the number, write the single line of code to check that number to a file, compile it, run it.

conclusion: 9:16 If windows says you can't compile a 40gb file you say yes you can

I took my first programming class in high school and one of my assignments was to write a program that let you select a month/year and the program displayed the calendar layout for that month. I proceeded to write out every possible calendar layout for each combination of days in the month and starting day of the week all chained together with if statements. After a few hours of copy pasting calendars and moving around the numbers my program was ready to be printed and passed in. Yes my teacher graded our programs by hand with pen and paper. After several minutes of the printer chugging along nonstop my classmates began to notice the monstrosity I had created. My teacher was not happy when I handed in 100+ pages.

someone really saw Yandere-Dev's code and said "bet"

I love that the guy used modulo in python to generate the first file

Using the slowest programming language to automate writing 4 billion if statements in the fastest programming language. That is gangster.

paid by the lines

"All unauthorized distribution of this source code will be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law" 💀

now make that an npm package for the world to depend on

Now I needs a part 2 comparing the performance of a 4 billion switch statement

why not create an api call to chatgpt for every number?

In theory you could have several 1000 people try out this program then record all there inputs then reorganize the ifs so that more common numbers are higher up in the if list to optimize it

This software is written and optimized for next gen hardware. You can't expect that your 10y old 4760k with 16GB of ram will be supported forever. This is unavoidable progress, it's time for an upgrade

I think theo said it best, when he said: Imagine showing this to a programmer 15-20 years ago. They would have an aneurysm.

Rust Programmer: Writes 4 billion if statements. Rust Compiler: "Cannot use moved value. Value moved in first if statement."

3:30 *"What could go wrong?"* is really THE fundamental question that drives the entire IT industry.

YOU MIGHT NOT LIKE IT, BUT THIS IS WHAT PEAK ENGINEERING LOOKS LIKE

No matter how many times I hear this story I keep laughing out loud. This guy better be a writer as a side hustle.

windows leaves some of the memory mapped pages in RAM even after quitting the program. So next time you run the program, it does not have to load all of them from disk, that's the magic why it's faster than loading from the disk. On a cold start will be much slower.

My favorite compiler. Python. Just as Ross van der Gussom envisioned.

You could achieve this by training 4 billion pigeons to peck a button if their number comes up.

I'd have a foot pedal mapped to SHIFT if i was programming DirectX

This reminds me of some advice I got at uni, if you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do something you might be doing it wrong. (paraphrasing a bit here but it applies)

From the title I thought we'd be reviewing YandereDev's code lmfao

In 5-10 years the compiler will notice that you could optimize all this with a mod function. He's just ahead of his time.

Average YandereDev script

Dang that’s bad…. Ever heard of a switch statement? That’d clean that right up

"And they call me a madman." "Who created 4 billions if statements. " "I'm a survivor. "

I love how those programs that generate the code to check if the number is odd or even, always have a "x % 2 == 0" somewhere

The 4GB file size limitation in the Windows PE file format is an artifact of its design and also how the Windows loader handles loading binary files. However, you can load multiple EXEs and DLLs into main memory that are each up to 4GB in size. The Windows loader performs a LOT of work when it loads a PE file into memory, including spending time remapping addresses in the code section so that the code inside executes properly. So to get it to compile, they could have broken up the file into multiple 4GB DLLs and then...loaded all of them with each one dependent upon the next one.

The logical evolution of this program would be, to publish it as a npm library which uses performant C library under the hood. I'd bet it would get 100k+ downloads within a year - if we figure out a nice, short and catchy name for it!

Amazing solution! Now we just need a JS version so we can add this to npm!

What a Chad. Hats off, my dude.

I’m ashamed to say, it took me a few rewatches until I grasped every step in this article.

Imagine the CPU franticly trying to pre-execute all those alternative code paths right from the start.

0:28 You should see some of the code I've seen in our core business critical systems...

this is absolutely deranged, and I mean in in the best possible way. I love it

That's some NPM worthy algorithm. Hats off

Wow. That was fun. Reminded me of what programming was all about when i was younger. That guy deserves respect.

I like the idea that at the end of it all there's some variation of "else: return x%2==0" Just in case there are any numbers not covered by the 4gb if statement.

That article is a work of art

This code is STILL more efficient than the code game devs make today

still faster than python

Laughed so hard I almost snorted my coffee :-) classic episode, thanks again primeagen

Why are we calling Guido van Rossum Ross van der Gussom? Is this a meme i missed?

Loving these challenges!

I needed this! Thank you❤❤😂😂😂😂

this made me laugh so hard, thank you sir! : D

Modified this for fun. Did a while loop with with a fll where the odd node pointed to the even node and vice versa and just moved to the next node and added one if the number didn't match. Not as impressive, but still a fun way to do it in the spirit of doing almost no math.

The person who rote the article woke up and chose violence with no witnesses, 11/10

And now we just need another 4 Billion of these and another function that determines which of them to use to get a universal modulo function. It's just that easy.

This might be my new favorite piece of programming media ever

Here I was thinking an "is-even" would be done well enough just by returning the inverse of the final bit of the number. This is so much better!

I strongly suspect the speed came from the CPU's branch prediction. After a few iterations, it would realise all previous cases are false and start pre-loading page after page of the code for the false paths only. Eventually, when the correct number rolled around, it would be true and, therefore, a prediction miss, but it only needs to go back and re-evaluate the true branch once and then quit the program.

I think you could short-circuit this and jump directly to the address where the comparison for the input number is done. Then, you can pre-compute the result. Then, you can pack this, because the result is always just a bit. PROFIT!

Funny ;-) Reminds me when I started to learn to program using the manual for C64 back in the days. I wrote a text-based adventure game using like only if, goto, print and input. Storage took up two sides of a cassette tape and the game wasnt long at all. Nevermind that when you played you had to type in the exact correct string to move on in the game.

7:28 WIN32 and their handles, messages, dwords was designed by a polish engineer who first introduced the idea of dynamically defining APIs with just prefixes.

Aint no way even as a beginner i ain't writing that much if statements. Too lazy

You also wrote a program like this once and that's one thing beautiful about learning how to program.

"This is where the machines can rise up" 😂

this is a fantastic video!

I happen to know what the problem is of why the line number error. Somewhere there is a part that noone bothered to change for 32 bit to 64 bit in the compile process, so it ran into the limit due the 32bit. How do I know? I tried to write a 6GB csv file on 32 bit Linux and it failed because it could not store the line number by around 4 GB

This is the funniest goddamn thing i've seen all week. People don't even know how efficient if statements are compared to switch statements or even if else statements.

Imagine if we used that compiling power to check any useful info instead of odd and even numbers 😢

Hmm, I think we can go larger, we use compression to store the machine code pull out the section we need and set the instruction pointer to it. What could go wrong. Or maybe we could generate the next if statement at the end of the last one.

Tried to do this in Rust with a 4 billion item long match statement that covered the entirety of u32, sadly I do not have enough ram or knowhow to get that working. Macros let you get around the whole 4gb file size limit but that's my limit. However with u16 it took something like 200ns to work out if a number was odd or even.

dude i need MORE from this Blabbin' guy! I can't believe he hasnt got more posts up fuck he's funny

I am just new in programming(start in the end of 2022 with C++, and now from November 2023 use C#), but that sounds so crazy😵

Reminds me of making PHP code that wrote javascript functions for each column dynamically based on the type of column because javascript didn't like polymorphic sorts.

This is pure madness. I like it 🤣

This is beautiful!

You don't even need modulo for this. Bit mask the input with bit wise & 1 and checking if it's >0 works. Probably faster than running the division instruction that gets run when you do a modulo operation.

This is much better than bitmasking the int, and using that as a boolean. I am truly humbled by this genius gigachad.

7:25 I think you should get a pedal that you can map to a specific button like caps lock and/or shift, that way you are not causing problems with your hands. After all your feet are just laying around being lazy.

Once worked with guy, we were supposed to convert data to a flexible third-party api, and different customers had different needs. He started coding, and his approach was code with lots and lots of if-statements. I had to step in and build a more abstract per-customer configurable solution that didn't involve hundreds of if-statements per customer. But I'm sorry I had to watch this to the end... :-/

You all laugh at this, but some form of this is actually _really_ highly performant for ab-initio quantum chemistry. It has really complicated numerical algorithms for the integrator, which if unrolled may be gigabytes of code, but the unrolled code runs on GPU an order of magnitude faster.

These articles are so fun and very well written compared to the geniuses at the ny post who came up with such bangers as “Reddit user praised after refusing to swap airplane seats with pregnant woman”

Combine the python and c program to count up to the number flipping an odd/even boolean. Does it run faster or slower? I wonder if you give it to ChatGPT and ask it to optimize whether it can. Can the compiler optimize it?

Respect for going through that whole ordeal tho

it's OS 'magic'.. that jump multiple block of mapped memory, to find a proper one. Mapped file is used by Memory Manager and split into blocks to fast access. Also ALL 'if' are linear, so system can do proper predictions. It will take much... much longer if this "if"s ware more random.

for the problem you mentioned at 7:25 - consider getting a shift key foot pedal.

This is amazing

The funny thing is that in the latest code generator he uses the modulo operator :)

having not yet finished the video I think the solution to the line limit problem is fairly obvious. make separate executables for each possible number. convert the number to a string and then call the file associated with that number.

i just started learning python the other day.... shouldn't you be able to use bitwise comparison and if the final bit is 1 its odd and if its 0 its even?

I was actually naive enough to attempt something like this. Around 1992 I began learning C. My only experience before this was with gwbasic. I wanted to display a bit maped picture and wrote a basic program to create a C source that was just a bunch putpixel calls, one for each pixel of a 640x480 image.

6:14 We need long long long(or int128_t I suppose). what exfat and ntfs, if an fs could support 2 ^ 128 - 1 bytes/blocks/etc. then it's next level

i would've tried to make multiple dlls to call from the main program, so we check every number every time, just in case, one can never be too sure

"Can we have O(1) code mom?" Mom: "We have O(1) code at home" The O(1) code:

I have no idea whats going on but I am very entertained

I did something similar in college. Assignment was converting Arabic numbers to Roman numerals. Professor made the mistake of specifying a domain of 1-4000, which was easily bruteforcable in a lookup table. I was rather proud of that troll.

The pronuciation of strtoul was spot on :D

most interesting 10 minutes of 2024

I'm usually marvelling at what the demoscene can cram into 64 or even just 4 kilobytes. Now I'm marvelling at the sheer abuse needed to do something so inefficiently you need gigabytes of code for the task.

When dealing with python nesting limitations, all you need to do is believe. Convert it to single if statements, when when Python still says no, write your own mapping python interpreter in C (or python)

I'm wondering if there is a way to just check if the first bit is zero or not instead.

now that I think about it, if we turn it into a binary search (for 32bit ints it'd only take 32 if statements, all nested] how good would the programm be?

This one made my day 😂😂

Oh my goodness, I just died!! 😂🤣😂🤣👏👏👏