Sorry that patch took so long to review. I installed it, along with the 
attached followup patches which are mostly just minor style things (plus 
fixing the attribution for a patch that I forgot to specify --author for).

I didn't get as much performance improvement on my platform, so I toned 
down the NEWS item a bit. Still, wow. It is a 2.5x performance 
improvement for that test case, and it's asymptotically better. Thanks.