On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 04:15:42PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>
> >On the other side, for a string that is matched against regexps, it doesn't
> >matter much if it has variable character length, since regexps normally read
> >all the string anyway, and indexing characters isn't much of a concern.
>
> You underestimate the impact of variable-length data, I think. Regexes
> should go rather faster on fixed-length than variable length data. How much
> so depends on your processor. (I can guarantee that Alphas will run a
> darned sight faster on UTF-32 than UTF-8...)
Umm, don't cpu data cache size issues complicate that? What if the ~4x
bigger UTF-32 string doesn't fit in the cache but the UTF-8 one does?
(I'm obviously simplifying somewhere here, but you get the idea.)
Tim.
