Re: faster strcpy()

kwrohrer@enteract.com
Sun, 26 Apr 1998 15:41:17 -0500 (CDT)

And lo, Alexander Kjeldaas saith unto me:
> Once upon a time, I was interested in compilers (guess I still am) and
> it bothered me that languages often need null-terminated strings to be
> compatible with the "C"-world. So I came up with the idea that in my
> compiler, I would pad all strings to be a multiple of the word-size of
> the machine. Then I would use between 4 and 1 null-bytes to terminate
> the string. That way, I remained compatible with C, but in all the
> str* routines, I only have to check one byte to know if I had come to
> the end of the string.
So what part of strtok's behavior would you break? (Assuming you could
get the compiler to align all your strings right...)

> It doesn't use any more memory either unless
> you want to pack strings really tight, something you usually don't
> want to do to avoid alignment problems.
Unless, of course, you're dealing with substrings...

>[Maybe this could]
> be used in the Linux kernel on architectures with less-than-optimal
> support for null-terminated strings.
Code which is already libc-free (like the kernel) is a good place in
general to try this. Just don't expect userland to cooperate, and
make it a config option for the poor folks with 4-8 megs of RAM...

Keith

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