Furthermore, how optimized was the C#.NET version? C# will even let you drop into C++ if you want..I have a feeling the C# version may not have been tuned effectively.
Yeah I'd guess perhaps it was part of the framework. The CLR's unfortunate use of UCS-2 (2-byte per char) can really hurt in a string processing system. You can easily go from C# to native and back, so who knows. Also, "help from Microsoft" can range widely.
