str.count is slow

[Fredrik Lundh]

Ben Cartwright wrote:

> > On my machine, the output is:
> >
> > str:     0.29365715475
> > array:   0.448095498171
> > unicode: 0.0243757237303

> This tactic typically avoids most (sometimes all) of the calls to
> memcmp.  Other string search functions, including unicode.count,
> unicode.index, and str.index, use this tactic, which is why you see
> unicode.count performing better than str.count.

it's about time that someone sat down and merged the string and unicode
implementations into a single "stringlib" code base (see the SRE sources for
an efficient way to do this in plain C).

moving to (basic) C++ might also be a good idea (in 3.0, perhaps).  is any-
one still stuck with pure C89 these days ?

</F>