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posted by LaminatorX on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil dept.

Subsentient writes:

"I've been writing C for quite some time, but I never followed good conventions I'm afraid, and I never payed much attention to the optimization tricks of the higher C programmers. Sure, I use const when I can, I use the pointer methods for manual string copying, I even use register for all the good that does with modern compilers, but now, I'm trying to write a C-string handling library for personal use, but I need speed, and I really don't want to use inline ASM. So, I am wondering, what would other Soylenters do to write efficient, pure, standards-compliant C?"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by sjames on Sunday March 16 2014, @06:32AM

    by sjames (2882) on Sunday March 16 2014, @06:32AM (#17106) Journal

    Not the same thing at all. Const can't be assigned at all (other than the initial assignment). Thi is entiorely different. There is a string pool containing one and only one copy of every string assigned anywhere. If you have char *a="hello " and char *b="there" and char *c = "hello there!", there will be 3 strings stored. If you concatenate a and b assigned to char *d, d will point to the same instance of "hello there" as c does (and it's reference count will be incremented).

    Unlike a const, you can then do d = "Never Mind".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:32PM (#17191)

    You mean whenever I change a string in Java, the JVM runs through ALL my strings in memory to make sure I don't have a duplicate string already? and there's no opting out??

    Yikes, that sounds like a huge waste of CPU cycles. I'll happily trade memory to get that performance back, thanks.