[fpc-devel] dominant short strings in compiler source

[Jonas Maebe]

On 16 May 2006, at 20:32, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:

> 1. It's heap based. There is a lot of memory manager overhead.
> 2. The implicit try...finally in each procedure that uses them  
> introduces a memory penalty
>    and a speed penalty.
>
> So I would really advise against this change. There is no gain,  
> except maybe for some
> external path settings. identifiers etc: there short strings are  
> more than enough.

Of course such a change would be only for paths and for calling  
external tools. That's what USE_SYSUTILS is all about. But the last  
time Peter benchmarked it, it made the compiler nevertheless almost  
20% slower. There is after all a lot of unit searching etc going on  
behind the scenes. Still, it may be better now with all the  
ansistring optimizations which have been added recently.


Jonas