- `str_null_check` was performed twice, once by `FilePathStringValue`
and a second time by `StringValueCStr`.
- `StringValueCStr` was checking for the terminator presence, but we
don't care about that.
- `FilePathStringValue` calls `rb_str_new_frozen` to ensure `fname`
isn't mutated, but that's costly for such a check. Instead we
can do it in debug mode only.
- `rb_enc_get` is slow because it accepts arbitrary objects, even immediates,
so it has to do numerous type checks. Add a much faster `rb_str_enc_get`
when we know we're dealing with a string.
- `rb_enc_copy` is slow for the same reasons, since we already have the
encoding, we can use `rb_enc_str_new` instead.
`chompdirsep` searches from the start of the string each time, which
perhaps is necessary for certain encodings (not even sure?) but for
the common encodings it's very wasteful. Instead we can start from the
back of the string and only compare one or two characters in most cases.
Also replace `StringValueCStr` for the simpler `rb_str_null_check`
as we only care about whether the string contains `NULL` bytes, we
don't care whether it is NULL terminated or not.
We also only check the final string for NULLs.
```
compare-ruby: ruby 4.1.0dev (2026-01-17T14:40:03Z master 00a3b71eaf) +PRISM [arm64-darwin25]
built-ruby: ruby 4.1.0dev (2026-01-18T12:55:15Z spedup-file-join 5948e92e03) +PRISM [arm64-darwin25]
warming up....
| |compare-ruby|built-ruby|
|:-------------|-----------:|---------:|
|two_strings | 2.477M| 19.317M|
| | -| 7.80x|
|many_strings | 547.577k| 10.298M|
| | -| 18.81x|
|array | 515.280k| 523.291k|
| | -| 1.02x|
|mixed | 621.840k| 635.422k|
| | -| 1.02x|
```
`File.join` is a hotspot for common libraries such as Zeitwerk
and Bootsnap. It has a fairly flexible signature, but 99% of
the time it's called with just two (or a small number of) UTF-8 strings.
If we optimistically optimize for that use case we can cut down a large
number of type and encoding checks, significantly speeding up the method.
The one remaining expensive check we could try to optimize is `str_null_check`.
Given it's common to use the same base string for joining, we could memoize it.
Also we could precompute it for literal strings.
```
compare-ruby: ruby 4.1.0dev (2026-01-17T14:40:03Z master 00a3b71eaf) +PRISM [arm64-darwin25]
built-ruby: ruby 4.1.0dev (2026-01-18T12:10:38Z spedup-file-join 069bab58d4) +PRISM [arm64-darwin25]
warming up....
| |compare-ruby|built-ruby|
|:-------------|-----------:|---------:|
|two_strings | 2.475M| 9.444M|
| | -| 3.82x|
|many_strings | 551.975k| 2.346M|
| | -| 4.25x|
|array | 514.946k| 522.034k|
| | -| 1.01x|
|mixed | 621.236k| 633.189k|
| | -| 1.02x|
```
Casting a pointer to create an unaligned one is undefined behavior in C
standards. Use memcpy to express the unaligned load instead to play by
the rules.
Practically, this yields the same binary output in many situations
while fixing the crash in [Bug #21715].
The "EXIVAR" terminology has been replaced by "gen fields"
AKA "generic fields".
Exivar implies variable, but generic fields include more than
just variables, e.g. `object_id`.
Peter Zhu