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Comments on No. 71 of 124 · Dennis Forbes on Software Development · edition of Tuesday 27 October 2026

Shlemiel the Painter Is Back: How Zig's Libc Rewrite Made SQLite 12,000× Slower

Summary

Zig's pure-Zig rewrites of several libc string functions (strspn, strcspn, strpbrk, strstr) measure the full string length on every call, so tokenizers that repeatedly call them on large inputs slow down quadratically.

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