Performance comparision

The tables below summarize the times (in milliseconds) of a performance test for various operations that take up the bulk of most string management in an average business application.

Unicode timings

	Str Library	STL basic_string	MFC CString
Object construction	865	1800	2280
String assignment	1050	1850	2480
Get string or character	615	1540	1570
Concatenation	1180	1230	1130
String scanning	630	1570	760

ANSI timings

	Str Library	STL basic_string	MFC CString
Object construction	780	1760	2140
String assignment	760	1640	2860
Get string or character	590	3530	1510
Concatenation	785	775	770
String scanning	745	1510	890

Conditions under which the tests were taken:

• Compiler: Microsoft Visual C++ .NET 2003 (aka 8.0), version of STL shipped with the compiler, CStringT class shipped with MFC and ATL; release build, optimize for speed (/O2)
• Hardware: AMD Thunderbird (Athlon family) 950 MHz, 100MHz front bus
• Software: Windows 2000 Server
• To have a fair comparision, Str Library was compiled in thread-safe mode. If support for multithreading is turned off, results (esp. in object construction and string concatenation) are even better.

Str Library outperforms significantly the other two alternatives, except in the area of string concatenation where the three implementations come very close.

See for yourself - download the test suite source code.  (Note: after you download the test suite, be sure to run Add Str Wizard against the decompressed source, in order to install the newest version of the product)