Comment by TeMPOraL

Yeah, but I think it puts to test the usual mantra of "write now, profile later, and optimize the bottlenecks". As reality repeatedly shows, developers often don't progress past the "write now" part, even if performance issues are crippling and annoying users to no end.

We can and should do better.

What this topic also is, is a reminder that with null-terminated strings and enough abstraction layers, you can easily make a O(n^2) or O(n^3) out of something you thought is O(n). I technically knew this (there was a popular article about it many years ago, I think by Joel Spolsky, but I can't find it now), but I didn't bother to look out for it in my current project. Thanks to this debacle, I'll do a performance review looking for "accidental quadratics", and I'm guessing many other developers will do it too. So it's a win!