base libraries

[Ian Lynagh]

On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 02:34:21AM +0100, Udo Stenzel wrote:
> 
> Pathnames are short strings.  No need to optimize for performance,
> instead optimize for clarity.

There have been times in darcs where the performance of path names was
an issue. For example, running "darcs whatsnew" in a large repository
with no changes was taking a few seconds, I think (which doesn't sound
very long, but feels like an age when you are waiting for the prompt to
appear).

I was able to cut it down to something almost unnoticable by optimising
(and thus losing clarity), but I think the code would have been both
faster and clearer had a suitable bytestring-like file path
representation been available.


Thanks
Ian