Parsing a string with inline C

@d3nd3-o0, it all depends what resolved means... For Espruino JS, the arguments are 'resolved enough' - so to speak - because any code (JS interpreter implementation) - knows to handle a String object: 'talk to it' thru the its method, since it is object-oriented and one of the main goals i to hide the implementation. If the C code does the same as, for example the String method implementations of String.charAt(pos) and String.indexOf(needleString,[startPos]) and (under the cover/indirectly E.toString(aString)) do, it would be just fine. After all, the method/property accessor String.length can do it without reading the String into memory where C code similar as suggested could do the job. An indication that String in JS are obviously looked at differently - have a different implementation - than in standard C - otherwise the length would not have to be passed: a reference to an object in an object-oriented context is all it needs to handle the job.

From what I get out of this 'exercise' is that an implementation for counting line feeds in JS may be almost as fast as doing it in C because the meat is not really in parsing the string but actually accessing the. bytes of the string. (@Gorden) I hope I can assume that something along the lines of

var str = "xoxo" // as: = require("Storage").read("FileName");
  , cnt = 0, start=-1, pos; // count occurrences of "x"
while ((pos = str.indexOf("x",start+1)) > start) { cnt++; start = pos; }

does / could (?) work without String.indexOf() having to read the whole string in memory. On the other hand I know that streaming implementations are demanding and it may well be that it is not worth - or possible - to spend so much code and temp memory for it since the majority of string that are processed aren't that long that they would need a 'streaming' treatment.

The statement 'almost equally as fast as C' ignores the parsing and interpreting of the JS source which Is though significant and the efficiency depends on how String.indexOf() with start pos is implemented for a String 'living' in the storage.