Did you ever saw a char and thought: "Damn, 1 byte for a single char is pretty darn inefficient"? No? Well I did. So what I decided to do instead is to pack 5 chars, convert each char to a 2 digit integer and then concat those 5 2 digit ints together into one big unsigned int and boom, I saved 5 chars using only 4 instead of 5 bytes. The reason this works is, because one unsigned int is a ten digit long number and so I can save one char using 2 digits. In theory you could save 32 different chars using this technique (the first two digits of an unsigned int are 42 and if you dont want to account for a possible 0 in the beginning you end up with 32 chars). If you would decide to use all 10 digits you could save exactly 3 chars. Why should anyone do that? Idk. Is it way to much work to be useful? Yes. Was it funny? Yes.
Anyone whos interested in the code: Heres how I did it in C: https://pastebin.com/hDeHijX6
Yes I know, the code is probably bad, but I do not care. It was just a funny useless idea I had.
I agree 100%! Butt I'm joking about a façade of optimization. Making code confusing and hard to interface with by making up custom data types. And for more context, their main project is a UI that takes >10 seconds to load and uses 2+GB of RAM. But at least the UUIDs in the SQLite DB are stored as hex instead of strings 😅 (even though I think everything in SQLite is actually stored as a string under the hood?)
I do still admire the desire for optimization - but it might be some sort of coping mechanism to ignore the insanely unoptimized bits of the project