On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 12:26, David Roundy wrote:
If you compare strings more often than you create strings, and the comparisons usually fail, you could add a hash of the string to your PackedString datatype; then psniceq could compare hash values first and only confirm equality with the memcmp if the hash values match.
In many cases, *very* large strings will be created and never compared, so hashing them doesn't sound like a good plan.
You could compute the hash lazily. (Of course, if most of your time is spent on successful comparisons, as you suspect, then none of the measures I suggest for speeding up unsuccessful comparisons will help much. I do have more ideas along that line, though, if it turns out that unsuccessful comparisons do take up too much time.) Carl Witty