in reply to The sum of absolute differences in the counts of chars in two strings.

Here's my benchmark of a couple of PP and several I::C versions based (loosely) on the ideas posted in the thread along with my chosen I::C version which gains a little performance by using chars for the counting as 127 chars is a reasonable maximum length. And gains a little more by restricting the alphabet to printable ascii chars only, which is also reasonable for the envisaged use. The benchmark results are:

       Rate    PP   trg    mb    Pb    JF    me
PP  0.168/s    --  -92%  -96%  -97%  -97%  -97%
trg  2.14/s 1170%    --  -55%  -58%  -59%  -68%
mb   4.72/s 2703%  121%    --   -8%  -10%  -30%
Pb   5.13/s 2948%  140%    9%    --   -3%  -23%
JF   5.27/s 3031%  147%   12%    3%    --  -21%
me   6.70/s 3881%  213%   42%   31%   27%    --

[download]

And the code:

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