[fpc-devel] Memory consumed by strings

[listmember]

On 2008-11-23 13:49, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>
> On 23 Nov 2008, at 12:35, listmember wrote:
>
>> But, isn't this a design-choice; caching all sources in memory for
>> speed reasons, as opposed to on-demand opening and closing each file.
>
> For very large projects, that should probably be done anyway at some
> point. But even in that case, using a more memory-efficient string type
> enables you to keep more data in memory and hence potentially obtain
> better performance.

The last time I joined a relevant discussion, I was told worrying about 
native UCS-4 string-type would be pointless simply because that sort of 
thing is really needed for word processors only.

Now, I have been informed that Lazarus (and perhaps other IDEs) use 
upwards of 50 MB string space just to do one of their basic operations.

That leaves me wondering how much do we lose performance-wise in 
endlessly decompressing UTF-8 data, instead of using, say, UCS-4 strings.