Thanks a lot for the testing and results! Very interesting!

I don't want yet to remove the ptr_compare code as the results depends a lot on:

• Size of strings and if strings are aligned
• If the cpu allows unaligned access

There is some benefit in knowing the exact length and alignment in advance instead of doing the check for each call. However your tests shows that for our most common platform the libc memcmp is better and I agree we should use that.

I prefer to keep the old code around, as it's still possible to do a faster memcmp based on the principle of ptr_cmp. I will take your excellent patch comment and disable the ptr_cmp code for now in preference of the standard memcmp.
@montywi

Pushed