The padding doesn’t have to be 0 because the comparisons are masked off so the padding bytes are not included. Also, there is no null termination assumption. Th

The padding doesn’t have to be 0 because the comparisons are masked off so the padding bytes are not included. Also, there is no null termination assumption. Though, I guess the last ‘fastest’ example does have the null terminator assumption but this should be assumed because it did assume zero padding. The only other assumption is that 8 bytes can be safely read and this is assumed in the original post. There might be an endian assumption.