Some performance questions

[bearophile]

Lars Kyllingstad:
> I merely wanted to know if the second solution would be significantly slower than the first one.<

No amount of theory can replace actual timings of your code snippets :-)
(It's often true the other way too, practice doesn't replace theory. But here there isn't too much theory, so lot of practice suffices if you don't know the theory).

Bye,
bearophile