Doesn't matter. It's fine for _l functions to be slower, because that's for information being formatted for display, which is inherently low-volume. What matt

Doesn't matter. It's fine for _l functions to be slower, because that's for information being formatted for display, which is inherently low-volume. What matters is to make the non-_l functions faster and more predictable, which is what you achieve by taking locale out of the equation.