some fails on overall conversion to char… am trying a more scaled back approach where just charToIntRepresentation returns a char array.

With 4 tandem spectra on E. coli (Escherichia_coli_K-12_MG1655.fasta) the improvement was 3.7% (1m51s to 1m47s). Not much.

With 68 tandem spectra on E. Coli there was, surprisingly, negative improvement ( 19m41s (1181s) to 19m55s (1195s)). The original source completes in 20m17s (1217s) — so total there is an overall performance increase of 3%.

NOTE: a C implementation of Levenshtein distance