Cost of code point order comparison

[Mark Davis]

I asked our performance czar to run a test comparing the performance of the two ICU utf-16 strcmp routines (UTF-16 binary order and UTF-8/32 binary order). While I want to caution that the results are preliminary, here they are:   "Test File       u_strcmp     u_strcmpCodePointOrder --------------------------------------------------- Asian Names       81 ns        83 ns / call Latin Names      127 ns       124 ns The test is a binary search of a sorted list of roughly 10000 names.  The Asian names are quite a bit shorter, which probably accounts for the time difference between them and the Latin names.   The code path through the u_strcmpCodePointOrder function has (statistically, anyhow) exactly one added simple if relative to u_strcmp.  The timing differences are repeatable on my machine, but are probably mostly noise from code alignment and the like..."