[Roboprog]

Well, the version of this I did in C for the shop I was at about 10 years ago had a "memcmp"-like interface. Just pass in a pointer to the start of the bytes (int, asciiz, unicode if you will) and the length.

I also dynamically allocated the key/pointer arrays within each node so that while it was sparsely populated, it was only big enough to hold the largest byte defined in that node (e.g. - 'A' = (char) 65, so byte positions 0 to 65 would be present, but not 66 to 255 until needed.

I was nice to see the impression of my coworkers when a bunch of qsort() / bsearch() code was replaced with this. We could afford the memory, and the speedup was fairly impressive.