use Perl

• Why? (Score:1)

  by mirod (2686)

  Because Perl s***s at XML ;--) (I will hunt you down anywhere you hide muaaaahahahaha!)
• It may be obvious, but... (Score:1)

  by godoy (2167)

  Matt, it may be obvious, but have you compared the algorithms used at xmllint and your Pure Perl parser?
  
  C allows some optimizations where Perl allow them to occur in other places.

  --
  -- Godoy.
  • Re:It may be obvious, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Matts (1087)

    The problem is that Perl is just slow. Not really much I can do about that. When you compare it to C, where it can do really nice things like char = ++*p to get the current character and move to the next byte in a string . With perl a similar idiom is: $char = substr($str, 0, 1, ''), which has a lot more overhead (same for a regexp to do the same). Character-wise coding in perl has always been a bit of a pain.
    • Re:It may be obvious, but... (Score:2)

      by Matts (1087)

      Err, that should have been char = *p++.
      
      My C sucks ;-)
    • Re:It may be obvious, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jdavidb (1361)

      Maybe someone needs to write a character-array manipulation class, a la PDL for huge matrix crunching. The class would gain a lot in efficiency for trading away the many capabilities Perl ordinarily gives. This would be something gross in XS, I'm sure.

      Or maybe, if I'm thinking of writing a custom text-manipulation class for Perl, something's dreadfully wrong with the world. In much the same way that we always took XML::Parser's dependence on a C parser as an indication that something was wrong (and we

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
• Profiling (Score:1)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  I'm presuming the answer is "Yes," but did you profile the code?

  matts: "Yes, jdavidb, I profiled the code and discovered 80% of the processing occurs in statements like $c = substr($buf, 0, 1); Get off my case! :)"

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re:Profiling (Score:2)

    by Matts (1087)

    Hehe, yeah I did profile, lots. (out of interest, anyone know why "use File::Temp" causes DProf to segfault?)
    
    I'm going to post something to perlmonks including the profiling output and the heavy subs in question. Maybe someone there can help out.