Stream and String performances

Hi,

can somebody explain me the following result:

[
        stream := WriteStream on: String new.
        stream nextPutAll: 'something to be put'.
        stream nextPutAll: 'something else to be put too'.
        ] bench.                                ===> '206796.4407118576 per second.'
.
[
        stream := WriteStream on: Array new.
        stream nextPutAll: 'something to be put'.
        stream nextPutAll: 'something else to be put too'.
        ] bench.                                ===>  '26177.36452709458 per second.'


Why does streaming over Strings is 10 times faster than streaming over Arrays?

Thank you

--
Damien Cassou

On Apr 2, 2007, at 17:25 , Damien Cassou wrote:

Because it's just a copying primitive as long as the collection type  
matches. In the second case you are actually extracting Characters  
one-by-one from the String. It'd be much faster to convert your  
strings to an Array only once, and then put those arrays onto the  
stream.

- Bert -

<Damien>Why does streaming over Strings is 10 times faster than streaming
over Arrays?</Damien>

It's because Strings store Characters as bytes (one or more, depending on
the encoding,) but Arrays store Characters as full Objects.

--Alan