jstewart@sce.carleton.ca (John Stewart) (01/30/90)
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. Our Sun-4 still blows the mainframe away though simply because it is a much faster machine. -- preferred address: John_Stewart@carleton.ca uucp: jstewart@sce.uucp "Support the President's War On Long Usenet Signatures"
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/07/90)
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