Re: XML::Saxon::XSLT2

On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 23:53 +0200, Thomas Krichel wrote:

>   Whatever module you use, it's not likely to be faster than the 
>   underlying processor, is it?


"My unoptimized C compiler came with my operating system so it's
bound to be better than a third party one, right?"

"No."

:-)

Very occasionally you will run across a combination of XML and XSLT for
which libxml will be faster than Saxon. More often Saxon will be faster,
sometimes by orders of magnitude. So if your transformation takes longer
to start than the JVM startup, it may be worth it.  Of course,
performance is likely to be secondary given that you're using perl in
the first place, right? :-)

>  Thus, if you are like me, and you
>   have a working XSLT implementation using XML::LibXSLT, is there
>   a reason to switch to a saxon-based module? A quick search
>   reveals 
> 
> http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xslt-benchmarks.html
> 
>   which claim that LibXSLT beats saxon hands-down. But it's
>   from 2006.

Right, and using the xslt 1 version of Saxon, before any optimization or
speedups were added.  You need to compare Saxon 8 or later, not Saxon 6.

The issue here is not C vs. Java, nor is it really XSLT 1 vs 2, it's
about current software with an active developer using relatively
advanced optimization techniques vs deadware.

It would be fabulous to see an XSLT 2 and XQuery implementation of
comparable quality that was in C and could be included in Perl and PHP,
but we're not there today.

(I just tried to do some comparisons, but I tend to use regular
expressions in my XSLT these days, and xsltproc/libxml doesn't have them
- it's also a bit like saying, "you can have embedded perl expressions
here, as long as they are perl 4.0 or earlier")

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org

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