62. Comparing Short Literals in Place in Direct Rules

• matchLiteral was the next call in the JSON ParseAST profile (about 4%), mostly for one-character literals such as "," and ":". Direct rules now compare a literal of up to four code points with p.in in place and call matchLiteral only when it does not match there (which records the expectation) or in Bytes. A test grammar covers literals of one to five code points, non-ASCII ones and literals cut off by the end of the input, in both units.
• Effect (min of 12 interleaved runs, Apple M3 Max, ParseAST): JSON 3.34 → 3.16 ms (−5%), XML 3.89 → 3.80 ms (−2%), Outline 2.14 → 1.97 ms (−8%); the calculators within noise (min of 8 runs).