half-baked parsers vs binary XML

[Gabe Beged-Dov]

Another reason (other than the binary XML thread) that I brought this up was discussion on
the perl-xml mailing list of whether XML::Parser was usable for soft real-time server side
processing. The consensus there seems to be no.

XML::Parser is layered on expat. Anecdotal evidence seems to be that there is an order of
magnitude performance advantage to "parsing" something other than XML. The two alternatives
are a textual format that Perl can eval directly (Data::Dumper) and a binary format
(Storable).

In both cases (Data::Dumper and Storable) there is conversion from the on-disk format to the
in-memory format. Why is XML so much slower according to developer feedback? That is what I
was trying to understand from other peoples experience rather than doing a hands-on analysis
myself.

I may have jumped to the conclusion that it was the extra work that a well-formedness
processor has to do over what a half-baked processor would do. That still leaves the quesion
of where the slowdown is and whether it is an implementation issue or inherent is some aspect
of XML parsing.

Thanks,

Gabe Beged-Dov
www.jfinity.com


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