Re: [xsl] Newbie question on XSL transformations: multiple sorts on element attr

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ronan Klyne wrote:
> (Hello)
>
> Are there any published numbers anywhere to demonstrate this?
>
> And do you mean that XSLT2.0 allows you to write faster code, or that
> the processors are better?
>
> 	Ronan

It is not that trivial, because the languages differ so much. I am not 
sure about published figures, but I remember a post on this list by 
Dimitre Novatchev (I hope I am right about the poster's name) who showed 
with FXSL a magnitude of performance gains.

That said, a simple example shows what can be achieved and why it is so 
significant. In XSLT 2, you can write "replace($value, "someString", 
"someOtherstring"), to replace all occurrences of 'someString' with 
'someOtherstring' in the value $value (these can be regular expressions, 
but parsing a regex in XSLT 1 is so utterly complex and time consuming, 
the comparison wouldn't be fair). The same replace will take a recursive 
template in XSLT 1.

Even without running the tests, you can imagine that XSLT 2 processor 
designers can optimize a single function with strict semantics much 
easier than they would with a complex recursive template.

Similar performance gains are made with XSLT having a new type system, 
with strong typing and sequences, which both were not there in XSLT 1. 
Not having a Node type just about everywhere makes for pretty amazing 
performance gains.

There are very many examples of XSLT 2 outperforming XSLT 1. But 
comparisons are hardly fair, as it almost feels like comparing a 
calculation program written in MS DOS Batch language (yes, it can be 
done!) to one that is made in JavaScript. Both are interpreted, but the 
languages differ a lot in their capabilities making comparising both 
look bad.

-- Abel