Left-Pad as a service

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Everyone is laughing over this. An 11 line function as its own NPM module? I am unsure how I feel. The trend has been to smaller and smaller pieces of functionality. I don’t find this outrageous. Still, the parody is funny:

c4n4rd is game:

This is really exciting!!! I was a bit disappointed that the right-pad will be out only in 2017. I am looking forward to that release because there is a high demand for it now.

What kind of load balancing is being used on the back-end? I called leftpad(str, ch, len) with the length I needed and noticed that is not very scalable because it is blocking.

A better approach I would recommend to those using it is to call the API in a for loop. In my tests, it had performance very close to those I see in C or assembly.

I was a bit turned off that the free version can only handle strings up to 1024 in length. I know you need to make some money, but it is big turn off for a lot of my projects.

Edit: I finally signed up for it but still noticed that I am only allowed to use 1024. I called your customer support line and they said I was calling the API from multiple IP addresses and for that I need an enterprise license. Please help me with this issue, it is very crucial at this point as my project is in a complete stop because of this.

jameshart makes it sound so real:

Best practice for performance for large left-pad jobs is to call the service recursively using mapreduce. Remember that left-pad(str,pad,n) is equal to left-pad(left-pad(str,pad,n/2),left-pad(“”,pad,n/2),n). This should run in logarithmic time and is highly parallelizable.

If you don’t like the “” magic string in there you could replace it with a call to left-pad(null, null,0).

Post external references

  1. 1
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350651
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