Let's build... IntegerString

[Merri]

This is an idea that popped up in the faster InStrRev thread: a replacement of String that is zero based and has more logical functions. I ended up building a Class Module, which you can't of course use in the same way you've used to use Strings. It also wastes some more memory, but in the other hand it allows us to do speed optimizations that otherwise would make things more complex to use as you'd need to initialize and clean up separately. With Class Module you have Initialize and Terminate events to handle that.

So this is what I have ended up this far: code removed, see second post

I haven't really thought of the procedure names carefully at the moment, so those are likely to change. I'm also thinking about separating them more so that there is always only a minimal amount of parameters, to keep final syntax easy to read.

So anyways, is this better than regular strings? Let us make a benchmark of a regular string usage:

' in Form1
Option Explicit

Private Sub Command1_Click()
    Dim sngStart As Single, lngA As Long, strResult As String
    
    sngStart = Timer
    
    For lngA = 1 To 100000
        strResult = strResult & "A!"
    Next lngA
    
    Command1.Caption = Format$(Timer - sngStart, "0.00000") & " - " & Len(strResult)
End Sub

Private Sub Command2_Click()
    Dim sngStart As Single, lngA As Long, strResult As New IntegerString
    
    sngStart = Timer
    
    For lngA = 1 To 100000
        strResult.ValueAppend "A!"
    Next lngA
    
    Command2.Caption = Format$(Timer - sngStart, "0.00000") & " - " & Len(strResult)
End Sub

Both add a string "A!" into the end of the string 100000 times, thus resulting into a string that is 200000 characters long. When I compiled this code using all advanced optimizations, I didn't actually expect much: afterall, each adding requires a ReDim Preserve into the integer array. I was surprised:

The native string way took 20 seconds! I knew it was slow, but I didn't remember it was that slow. Now how about IntegerString? It was done immediately, in about 0.05 seconds. The result from both is the same, a string of 200000 characters.

So does this look like something that is worth to develop further?


Edit!
Adding before the IntegerString in the other hand is far slower, that needs some rethinking on how it should be done. Currently it runs for over 50 seconds and that isn't acceptable.

Edit #2!
Now improved to be almost as fast as string. Though it still needs some thinking on the implementation side.