Re: [xsl] Santa has come early

Subject: Re: [xsl] Santa has come early
From: Colin Paul Adams <colin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:21:38 +0000
>>>>> "Abel" == Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

    Abel> Thanks Santa for you present!  In lieu of today's

You are welcome.

    Abel> (tonight's, depending where you live) discussion about
    Abel> performance measurement, which is, as you pointed out, far
    Abel> from trivial, I found the fast startup time of your Gestalt
    Abel> processor remarkable. Your PE executable (yes, I use

What's PE stand for?

    Abel> Windows) has a startup time on my system of way below 0.1
    Abel> seconds. Which compares to Saxon + JVM which takes about
    Abel> 0.56 seconds to startup.

That's typically the sort of thing I see too, on Linux.

    Abel> Yet on larger input it failed (but in all honesty, that

Failed?

    Abel> "larger input" processing XSLT was optimized with Saxon in
    Abel> mind), from the earlier thread, same link on EE:
    Abel> http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web_Development/Web_Languages-Standards/XSLT/Q_22850559.html,
    Abel> Gestalt proofs roughly 2.8x slower. But I don't think it is

In general, Gestalt is very slow on large XML source documents.
I doubt if this will improve in less than a year.

    Abel> fair to compare a 1.0 version to a 9.0 version and neither

Well, it is fair - no-one has the option of using Gestalt 9.0.

    Abel> is it fair to compare based on one run with one stylesheet
    Abel> and one input doc, though I believe it is a very good

It's fair for that combination only.

    Abel> performance indeed (and about 1600 times faster than Altova
    Abel> on selected stylesheets (on many Altova doesn't finish at
    Abel> all...)).

On my system Altova won't even start (because I use Linux).

    Abel>  1. With the experts-exchange stylesheet it makes the
    Abel> uppercase root tag a lowercase root tag on output (it is an
    Abel> uppercase LRE in the XSLT source) 2. The fizzbuzz stylesheet
    Abel> (see below) doesn't run at all, though I believe it is a
    Abel> valid stylesheet. It errors out with:

    Abel>      TODO: {XM_XPATH_TOKEN_ITERATOR}.another needs to be
    Abel> written Call on Void target!  Unhandled exception

Can you raise bugs on the soirceforge tracker please?

    Abel>  3. I didn't find a way to run a stylesheet with no input
    Abel> document, but with an initial template. Is this possible in
    Abel> a way?

Yes.
--template=initial will run the template named initial. (I never use
main - it's a poor choice of name in many cases, and I value
consistency in naming, but you may do so).

    Abel>  4. The version number output with --version is "3.7",
    Abel> though the software is shipped as "1.0". Which should it be?

Both.
3.7 is the version number of the Gobo project, of which the Gobo
Eiffel XSLT library is an integral part (I think it was at version 3.2
when i started the development).
1.0 is the version number of the Gestalt command-line interpreter,
which is a front-end for the library + the addition of network
protocols (which lie outside the scope of Gobo).

I know it's confusing, but I don't have a satisfactory solution yet
(--version returns the same string as system-property ('xsl:version')).

    Abel> If you'd like to have more input, I can run a couple of more
    Abel> tests. Should I post any findings here or do you rather have
    Abel> them on the Gestalt list?

On the Gestalt users list please.
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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