[fpc-devel] dominant short strings in compiler source

[Peter Vreman]

>
> 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.
>

The SysUtils unit misses some performance tweaks that the Dos unit has.
Especially for the FindFirst/FindNext part. But this has low prio for the
current developpers so it hasn't been analysed and fixed yet.