JuliaLang/julia — comment on commit d37b9df05c8a216dd7fbae7b1519c01191356561
File:  line 0
By JeffBezanson:

I did a quick test and this is only about 2.6x slower than printing an integer. I'm quite pleased with that, considering the extra objects and indexing and such involved. Still might make sense to try to max out performance though.

In related news, it may be time for the built-in integer printing methods (based on printf) to die:

```
julia> @time for i=1:1000000; string(1); end
elapsed time: 1.094998836517334 seconds

julia> @time for i=1:1000000; dec(1); end
elapsed time: 0.2381420135498047 seconds
```