[fpc-pascal] Passing around Pascal strings vs AnsiString

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2023, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:

> I was curious, if you had a Pascal (short) string and it was going to be
> passed around often would that be slower than using an AnsiString since
> its size is that of a pointer?  I always prefer short strings when I know
> the length will be less than 255 but can copying that value between
> function calls add up to be more than the cost of allocating and reference
> counting the AnsiString?

For parameters that are passed by value, the copying most likely will be
slower since all bytes from the string must be copied to the new string.

For var parameters it should not matter.

Michael.