66467 - use atoms everywhere (and not strings) for "us-ascii", "UTF-8", etc.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

looking around at the i18n code and in mime, we do a lot of string allocations
and strcmps charsets.  (grep for "UTF-8" and "us-ascii" for example)

we should fix the code to use atoms, instead of strings.  it would save us
memory and time.  That's just a hunch.  I haven't quantified to prove this

Don't bother on starting on this until we get good quantify data to back it up.

Comment 1

[nhottanscp]

Moving to future for now.
One thing I found is converting to charset atom needs to call do_GetService, and
that is expensive (more expensive than strcmp). If we change to atom, we need to
use atom in everywhere so we don't need to convert back and forth between atom
and string.

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

updating summary.

yes, we need to use them everywhere instead of converting back and forth.

I doubt this will be a big performance win, but we should still do it, since it
is the right thing.

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

The gain we'd get from atomization is probably not worth the effort required to do so--relatively few checks per individual (and very short) strings.