mozilla/rust — pull request #8590 by blake2-ppc (2013-08-18 12:41:21+00:00)
Title: CharIterator changes for std::str

Implement CharIterator as a separate struct, so that it can be .clone()'d. Fix `.char_range_at_reverse` so that it performs better, closer to the forwards version. This makes the reverse iterators and users like `.rfind()` perform better.

Before
test str::bench::char_iterator ... bench: 146 ns/iter (+/- 0)
test str::bench::char_iterator_ascii ... bench: 397 ns/iter (+/- 49)
test str::bench::char_iterator_rev ... bench: 576 ns/iter (+/- 8)
test str::bench::char_offset_iterator ... bench: 128 ns/iter (+/- 2)
test str::bench::char_offset_iterator_rev ... bench: 425 ns/iter (+/- 59)

After
test str::bench::char_iterator ... bench: 130 ns/iter (+/- 1)
test str::bench::char_iterator_ascii ... bench: 307 ns/iter (+/- 5)
test str::bench::char_iterator_rev ... bench: 185 ns/iter (+/- 8)
test str::bench::char_offset_iterator ... bench: 131 ns/iter (+/- 13)
test str::bench::char_offset_iterator_rev ... bench: 183 ns/iter (+/- 2)

To be able to use a string slice to represent the CharIterator, a function `slice_unchecked` is added, that does the same as `slice_bytes` but without any boundary checks.

It would be possible to implement CharIterator with pointer arithmetic to make it *much more efficient*, but since vec iterator is still improving, it's too early to attempt to re-implement it in other places. Hopefully CharIterator can be implemented on top of vec iterator without any unsafe code later.