[webkit-dev] Feature Announcement: Detection and marking of ascii strings

[Dan Carney]

When creating String objects, it is for the most part free or
extremely cheap to make the distinction between ascii and latin1 where
the detection of latin1 strings is already taking place.  Moreover,
there are bits already available in StringImpl to hold this data,
making storage of it cheap/free, depending on which bit is used.

By knowing when a latin1 string is actually ascii, several
optimizations become available such as memcpy() conversion to utf8 and
faster JavaScript regex engines, which for the most part perform their
regexing on ascii strings.

A meta tracking bug has been created here for comments, etc:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92677.

Please let me know if anyone has questions or concerns.

Thanks,
Dan