String compare performance

[Stewart Gordon]

On 27/11/2010 23:04, Kagamin wrote:
> bearophile Wrote:
>
>>> Also, is there a way to bit-compare given memory areas at much
>>> higher speed than element per element (I mean for arrays in
>>> general)?
>>
>> I don't know. I think you can't.
>
> You can use memcmp, though only for utf-8 strings.

Only for utf-8 strings?  Why's that?  I would've thought memcmp to be 
type agnostic.

Stewart.