On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 01:51:36PM +0100, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
[...] 
> If one wanted really to improve the situation, it would be better to change
> the representation of strings, and to encode the string length in the
> first word after the header. This wastes much less memory (except in the
> special case when you have many small strings), and is probably neutral
> for the execution speed.

Well, what is done inside the Buffer-module?
I have not looked inside, but appending strings
with Buffer-module is about 11 times faster than
using "^"-operator in a small program, that
uses string-append-operator ^in a lexer file (ocamllex);
as switching to Buffer-module this speedup was amazing...

Ciao,
   oliver