dash-em

dash-em is a specialized string manipulation library written in C, designed to remove em-dashes (U+2014) from UTF-8 encoded text. The project is explicitly described as a "meme" or "joke" library due to the simplicity of the task it performs, but it is implemented with serious engineering rigor. The core of the library utilizes Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) vectorization to process large chunks of text simultaneously, supporting instruction sets like AVX-512, AVX2, SSE4.2, and ARM NEON. This results in throughput speeds ranging from 1.27 GB/s to over 42 GB/s, depending on the hardware and the density of em-dashes in the input. In addition to the raw C implementation, dash-em provides bindings for a wide range of programming languages, including JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C#/.NET, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Kotlin, R, Dart, Scala, Perl, Lua, Haskell, Elixir, Zig, and Objective-C. These bindings allow developers to leverage the high-performance C core from within their preferred language environment. For example, the Python bindings are reported to be up to 766x faster than pure Python byte manipulation, and the JavaScript bindings offer up to 40x speedups over standard Buffer operations. The library is distributed via standard package managers (e.g., npm, pip, cargo) and includes comprehensive test suites and continuous integration pipelines to ensure stability across platforms. While the practical utility of removing em-dashes at such high speed is questionable, the project serves as a valuable demonstration of SIMD optimization techniques and cross-language binding architecture.