> New MLton sped things up by 17%. The C version (with the #define's to speed > up getc/putc) is 3.4 times faster than the new version and 4 times faster > than the old. Sadly still a long way to go. Indeed. The best thing I can suggest is for you to play around with -profile (both alloc and time), -profile-il, and -profile-basis to see if you can figure out why things are so slow.