[bombela]

It is most likely not a performance issues right now, but every pessismisation compound and catch up to you eventually.

36B vs 16B today, tomorrow you need an array of it, and now it isn't cache aligned, and more than twice the overhead.

Most likely instead of manipulating a 36B fixed length string, it is handled as a dynamic string, for extra runtime memory allocations, most likely consuming at least 64B per allocation. Etc etc.

Do this all over the codebase and now you know why all the moderne software is a sloth on what was a supercomputer 30y ago.