Comment by kika
13 years ago
This doesn't add up. I started programming in late 80-ies, I've learnt Forth, C, WinAPI (I started seriously developing Windows programs with 2.0! Gosh, how old I am...), then moved to the brighter side, learnt C++, LISP, I used ksh and vi (never was smart enough to master Emacs), used sccs and then rcs, wrote my own implementation of TCP, did some embedded work in C and asm, etc, etc etc.
Given that list, what would you consider obsolete now? It's been 2 decades, not 1, mind you. Asm? Well, the last time I touched this sword for a reason was 2005 and it was SSE assembler, something that compilers were not able to generate efficiently then (and to the large extent still not able).
Yeah, like very quick lowercasing of blocks of ASCII text, 8 characters at a time:
Out of curiosity what kind of program were you writing that it was bottlenecked by a UTF8 lowercase conversion?
A text indexer. It did case-insensitive searching, so I lowercased everything (both source text and search terms), allowing me to use a quicker substring search (i.e., no need to compare characters with case insensitivity).
The indexer had to chew huge amounts of text, so the quicker the lowercasing, the better.