U-Boot is a bit special piese of software because it is being
only executed once on power-on as compared to operating system
for example. That's why we don't care much about performance
optimizations instead we're more concerned about size. And up-to-date
compilers might produce much smaller code compared to
performance-optimized routines copy-pasted from the Linux kernel.
Here's an example:
------------------------------->8--------------------------
--- size_asm_strings.txt
+++ size_c_strings.txt
@@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
text data bss dec hex filename
- 121260 3784 3308 128352 1f560 u-boot
+ 120448 3784 3308 127540 1f234 u-boot
------------------------------->8--------------------------
See we were able to shave off ~800 bytes of .text section.
Also usage of string routines implemented in C gives us an ability
to support more HW flavors for free: generated instructions will match
our target as long as correct compiler option is used.