Remedial scripting: Need Mono memory trick

[Qie Niangao]

Somehow I haven't had occasion to worry about this since Mono, but I'm now trying to squeeze as many characters as possible into a string.  I realize I have no idea how to do it any more.

In LSO, we'd use an embedded empty assignment, as in the following example:

 

string myString;
integer CEILING = 2000;
string dummyText = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.  Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.\n";

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llOwnerSay("Free mem = "+(string)llGetFreeMemory()
                +"; strLen = "+(string) llStringLength(myString));
        while(CEILING < llGetFreeMemory())
            //myString += dummyText;
            myString = (myString = "") + myString + dummyText;
        llOwnerSay("Free mem = "+(string)llGetFreeMemory()
                +"; strLen = "+(string) llStringLength(myString));
    }
}

Compiled as LSO, that dutifully gobbles up most of the script's original 15753 free memory into the string.  In Mono, it has to stop just shy of half the original 60882 free mem, and behaves exactly the same as the straight "+=" assignment.  I knew that trick didn't work in Mono, but what is to be done instead, to avoid leaving the whole intermediate string on the stack when making an assignment in Mono?

ETA:  Oh crap.  Looking at a jira, it appears that Mono uses UTF-16 encoding for strings (and even UUIDs !?!), which I'd ruled out as being simply too silly to consider.  Taking that into account, it seems it's not that stuff is getting stranded on the stack, it's that stuff is just twice as big as it has any reason to be. So... sorry for the distraction.

 

[Cerise1488303085]

Hi Qie, there are some Mono friendly string stuffing tricks here. You might need to use segments to work around the free space trouble.

[Qie Niangao]

Thanks Cerise.  That wiki article has a nice clear explanation of how to compress text for storage.  Unfortunately, however, I'm trying to cons up an actual string to pass to llHTTPResponse(), so even if I compressed the text for storage I'd have to uncompress it all at once to pass into that function.  So I'm screwed, but it's still a good technique to have handy.