Do we want more latin1-specific procedures?

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Andy,

I see that you've added a bunch of latin1-specific procedures to the
ethreads branch, which I guess is part of your optimization work.

I'm very concerned about adding more latin1-specific code (and even
worse, interfaces), given that the world is clearly moving to UTF-8, and
given that we have a tentative plan (or at least so I thought) to change
the internal string representation to UTF-8 for Guile 2.2.

Keep in mind that if/when we switch to UTF-8, the UTF-8 functions will
become the fast paths and the latin1 ones will become slower.  As part
of my UTF-8 work, one of the tedious jobs I will have to do is to find
and fix all of the places where latin1-specific procedures are used as
an optimization.

By adding more latin1-specific code, not only are you adding
optimizations that only help a small percentage of the world's
population (and only those who aren't using UTF-8), you are also adding
to the tedious portion of the work I will have to do later.

If you insist on these optimizations, would it be possible to optimize
for ASCII instead?  The nice thing about ASCII-specific procedures is
that they will be fast in both our current string representation and in
the planned UTF-8 representation as well.

What do you think?

    Mark