4 ms·

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 do

by 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