News•Feb 1, 2026
Converting Floats to Strings Quickly
Converting binary floating‑point numbers to decimal strings is a core step in JSON, CSV, and logging pipelines. Recent research benchmarks modern algorithms—Dragonbox, Schubfach, and Ryū—showing they are roughly ten times faster than the original Dragon4 from 1990. The study finds string‑generation now consumes 20‑35% of total conversion time, and implementations like std::to_chars and fmt still use up to twice the optimal instruction count. Moreover, none of the existing functions consistently produce the mathematically shortest representation, e.g., std::to_chars prints 0.00011 instead of the shorter scientific form.
