4 ms·

I'm actually wondering why they do not compare the lengths first, anyone know? To me that would seem like the first obvious optimization, do not run the charact

• gizmo686 10y ago
  If the strings are not equal, they still need to say which string is "smaller" (eg. comes first alphabetically).
  • tyfon 10y ago
    Well, that explains it! :)
• vkjv 10y ago
  This is lexical comparison (<, >, =) not just equality.
• maggit 10y ago
  In addition to what has been said about lexicographic ordering, if the strings are large, say several kB (as they may well be), the entire operation would be dominated by memory latency. In this case it is much cheaper to read each string once, instead of going an extra pass just to find the length.
  • jdale27 10y ago
    These are not null-terminated strings; it's not necessary to read the whole string to find its length.
    • maggit 10y ago
      Ah, sorry, my bad. There is so much talk about null-terminated strings here, and I had only skimmed the article. Whoops :P