Re: [bug-gnulib] iconv made easy

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> MB_LEN_MAX is not usable, see your quotearg.c commit from 2000-07-23, and
> also because some iconv conversions need up to 12 bytes per character,
> whereas on glibc systems MB_LEN_MAX = 6.

OK, but then we can just use 12 instead of MB_LEN_MAX.  Or whatever
the practical bound happens to be.  (Using 16 would make the code run
a tad faster.)

There is the problem that, if we use (say) 16, then we can't handle
more than SIZE_MAX/16 bytes.  But I don't think this is a practical
issue worth slowing the code down for.

We are talking about a factor-of-two CPU speedup here, in the worst
case: it's worth spending some memory to get that.