How expensive is building canonical strings?

[R James Noble]

> It's probably not blindingly fast but fast enough to handle a few
> thousands of events per seconds

I've used this to do mouse-sensitive buttons using X - when your
cursor is over a button, the button is highlighted. I found it was
usually fast enough, modulo environmental effects (scavenging, GC,
recompilation, swapping, paging, anyone else using the machine, or any
other self thread doing anything). These tend to swamp a single string
canonicalise or perform! I was going to try real point-by-point mouse
tracking but didn't get round to it.

I guess the solution to this is to buy one of them new-fangled
multiprocessor suns, and then parallelise the Self threads, the
compiler, and the GC...

kjx