Execution of the test program below goes from 14s to 0.09 s (unoptimized build, Athlon 800).
leo
_main:
set S0, ""
set I0, 100000
time N0
lp:
concat S0, "1234567890"
dec I0
if I0, lp
time N1
sub N1, N0
print "Len "
length I1, S0
print I1
print " time "
print N1
print "\n"
end