Also, the article has absolutely nothing about testing methodology. I'm guessing you're using Go's built-in benchmarking, but it still needs to be clarified; are the timings the mean, 95th percentile, or what? What about variance -- better CPU cache usage would lead to less variance, I would guess?
Interesting article, though. Thanks for writing it.
And you are absolutely correct about the bar charts. Not exactly sure why I chose line but they have been replaced now.
The testing didn't use the built-in benchmark mechanisms but it did use the *testing.T mechanism. It's basically runs of different algorithms on the same set of pre-loaded integers. And then I recorded the time (ns) it took to run compression and decompression (time.Since(now).Nanoseconds() where now was time.Now()).
The caching effect should be pretty similar for all the algorithms since they work off the same LARGE slice of data, afaict.
I will update the article to reflect the testing methodology (may be a few days before I can get to it though.)
THanks
PS. I noticed you have an article about bitmap indexing. I hope you realize that the algorithm you're using is based on WAH, which is patented by the DoE.
In any case, EWAH is designed to avoid the WAH patent. According to the author, the Apache people checked things out when they adopted it for Apache Hive and they were apparently satisfied.
If Apache is satisfied, I think we are safe. :)