Newsgroups: ont.general
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: strings statistics site(s) wanted
Message-ID: <1990Feb6.173033.16219@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Jan28.041105.23680@utzoo.uucp> <770@sce.carleton.ca>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 90 17:30:33 GMT

In article <770@sce.carleton.ca> jstewart@sce.UUCP (John Stewart) writes:
>I find it pretty amazing that vendors who are selling thousands of workstations
>couldn't be bothered to optimize their string functions.  Last year I wrote
>an ANSI C runtime library for our mainframe and it was trivial to write all
>the string functions in assembler.  On a CISC machine most string functions 
>effectively translate down to one or two instructions...

And my experimental C code beats them!  "Work smart, not hard."

It *is* annoying that vendors put so little effort into their libraries.
Actually, I get more annoyed about stdio than strings.  String functions
are seldom a major part of a program's execution, but slow implementations
of stdio waste billions of dollars of CPU time every year.
-- 
SVR4:  every feature you ever |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
wanted, and plenty you didn't.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu