Initially I noticed that I was copying twice unnecessarily (once in init() after nulling out memory, and again after returning from init()). After cleaning that up, I realized that we don't need to create a new buffer at all if the program never malloc-ed, so sometimes we can skip the re-init and we can always avoid the double-copy. I don't know if this is actually measurable anywhere, but I spot-checked some results and I still seem to be getting the same answers, so I'm gonna roll with it.