String processing is essential in many UNIX commands. C strings are terminated with nul characters.
Routines processing such strings, such as those provided by the C standard library libc are often reduced to walking through strings character by character in search for the nul terminator. This is why these operations have the reputation of poor performance.
The FreeBSD Team has been working in a reimplementation of libc string functions using SIMD techniques and getting advantage of instruction set extensions by new CPUs.
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