Parsing millions of URLs per second

Abstract

URLs are fundamental elements of web applications. By applying vector algorithms, we built a fast standard-compliant C++ implementation. Our parser uses three times fewer instructions than competing parsers following the WHATWG standard (e.g., Servo's rust-url) and up to eight times fewer instructions than the popular curl parser. The Node.js environment adopted our C++ library. In our tests on realistic data, a recent Node.js version (20.0) with our parser is four to five times faster than the last version with the legacy URL parser.