Weeeell, turns out there was still a LOT to gain by safe-Code related optimizations. Thank God for insomnia. Now even Microsoft's .NET produces faster MD5 with safe code (about 3%). Sweet! Well, that proves once again, don't ever assume anything, when it comes to optimization, ever. I made the error to assume that pointer operations would be faster, but unfortunatelly (or fortunatelly?!?) that's not the case here.

Btw: Coding stuff like

PLAIN TEXT
C#:
  1. buffer[shift] = ...;
  2. buffer[shift + 1] = ...;
  3. buffer[shift + 2] = ...;

is way faster than

PLAIN TEXT
C#:
  1. buffer[shift] = ...;
  2. buffer[++shift] = ...;
  3. buffer[++shift] = ...;

even though it is best to avoid arrays as much as you can! ;) But, damn, damn - I am so not looking forward to catagolizing all the optimizations I made. Not even making a list of what is better than something else, since it is obvious that the only way to find that one out is to try - but even just a list of stuff I did ... Oh, well - maybe tomorrow... Or during the next case of insomnia