okay so hamming distance of 2 strings with 1000 (u8/byte) characters each takes 80 nanoseconds. yes, NANOseconds

thats 1 byte every 0.08 ns on my 2.7 GHz (0.4 ns/cycle) intel i7 cpu, or 5 byte every cycle

wait... how can 1 byte take less than 1 cycle to process?? simd! 32 bytes are processed at once in a loop. therefore, each loop iteration takes slightly more than 6 cycles

this makes sense, since 2 pipelined loads + 1 cycle compare + 2 cycle movemask + 1 cycle popcount + 1 cycle addition = ~6 cycles

however, the benchmarked throughput matches the theoretical throughput so well that i think there must be a bug somewhere. i need to double check

and of course, levenshtein distance takes ~8.5 us for two 1000 byte strings, which is 1 byte every 8.5 ns or 1 byte every 23 cycles

very, very fast but my code only supports up to 30 edits between two strings and im not paid enough to make it handle more