that might be more efficient

I am not sure. Some years ago Nicholas Clark introduced a change in the internal representation of SVs that made then very efficient for integers and doubles. Briefly, all internal types used to have a fixed size head (SV_HEAD) and a variable sized body. That change, used a trick to embed the body inside the header for SVs representing numbers, making then more cache friendly and reducing memory usage by eliminating the body part.

So, having two arrays with numbers may actually use less memory than an array of small strings.

In reply to Re^3: Memory efficient way to deal with really large arrays? by salva
in thread Memory efficient way to deal with really large arrays? by sectokia

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