36. Comparing Texts Without Boxing Them

• text(...) returns a string as an interface value, which allocates for the string header. The XML example compares the name of every end tag with its start tag ({text($e) == text($n)}), which was 18k of its 19k allocations per parse. A comparison text(a) == text(b) (or !=) is now evaluated as a string comparison by the closure backend and emitted as one by the code generator. The VMs still box the strings (avoiding it there would take a new instruction).
• Effect (min of 12 interleaved runs, Apple M3 Max, XML): closure 14.1 → 13.8 ms, generated 9.9 → 9.6 ms, recognition 11.7 → 11.4 ms; 19k → 1.1k allocations.