[xsl] Big change (Was: Re: [xsl] [ANN] Saxon 8.6)

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

For those who haven't noticed:

<quote
from="http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/changes/intro/internal86.html";>
A new optimization has been introduced to ensure that a recursive
function that builds a sequence by incremental append operations now
has linear performance: the time taken, and the memory used, are both
proportional to the length of the sequence (and to the number of
recursive calls). Note that it is useful to write such functions to be
tail recursive. The optimization typically operates when a function
returns a result that is obtained by appending to the sequence
supplied as the argument. This optimization makes use of a new
sequence representation (ShareableSequence) that allows many sequences
to share the same underlying list in memory, provided that the value
of each of the sequences is a leading sublist of this underlying list
</quote>

This simply means that one of the most frequent operations in a
typical XSLT transformation has just become O(N) rather than O(N^2) ,
that is linear from quadratic!

Do I have to explain what a leap forward this is in XSLT efficiency?

Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev


On 11/4/05, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Following the publication of the Candidate Recommendation for XSLT 2.0 and
> related specifications earlier today, I am pleased to announce the release
> of Saxon 8.6, which is a complete and conformant implementation of these
> specifications. A full conformance statement is included with the product,
> and will be available on the Saxonica web site shortly.
>
> For the open-source Saxon-B product, visit http://saxon.sf.net/
>
> For the schema-aware commercial Saxon-SA product, visit
> http://www.saxonica.com/
>
> Existing licences for Saxon-SA will work with the new release if they were
> issued after 3 November 2004.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica Limited
>
>


--
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.