Comment by phkahler

>> I have no idea if this is the case here, and I suspect it might not be, but pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove' that it can be faster by making a proof-of-concept the only reason theirs is faster is because it doesn't implement the important-but-slow bits and it ignores most of the edge cases.

Even in those cases it usually turns out that the handling of edge cases was considered reason enough to sacrifice performance rather than finding a better solution to the edge case. Handling edge cases probably should not cost 10x average performance.