Low-level performance optimization is a challenging endeavor. It requires a wide breadth of knowledge and can be agonizingly slow. But there’s such a sense of joy in seeing that your code has become that little bit faster. You can always be better. It’s my favorite thing in the world.

In this talk, I’ll guide you through this process, with a deep dive in string interning. It has a simple problem statement, it’s easy to write a naive implementation, and there’s an astonishing amount to optimize. I’ll walk you through my journey of writing a multi-threaded string interner, from the problem statement to publishing the fastest string interning library on crates.io. My goal is to show you the joy of low-level optimization, and to share the tools needed to it yourself.