RE: XML was RE: [GD-General] RE: A portable preferences library

[Ivan-Assen I. <as...@ha...>]

> Saying that all open source implementations of an XML parser
> are 'bloated messes' is highly prejorative and demonstrably wrong.

Not all; I was saying that Xerces, last time I checked it, was a bloated mess.

> I would suggest that an Apache implementation of an XML parser
> is more likely to be fast and effective than an MS one, because
> they have some thousands of developers looking over their shoulder.
> A benefit MS does not have.

To the contrary. MS does have thousands of developers in-house, a lot of them
depending on the quality of the XML parser. Microsoft has a very well developed
system for internal communications, so I wouldn't be suprised if developers
of core components like MSXML get the same, if not greater feedback than
open source projects.

> To include 'a couple of lines of COM calls' as a complete use of
> an XML parser fails to account for the unmeasurable costs of using
> a system which you cannot profile, let alone modify, which is designed
> to cover a multitude of sins as opposed to the relatively small number
> needed for a given application.

The choice of XML is first and foremost based on convenience,
not performance. As others have pointed out besides me, you should 
convert to binary formats for runtime loading.

> This is a matter of engineering. There are notable technical advantages
> of using an open source standardised solution over using a closed 
> proprietry one. 

Xerces isn't any more "standardised" than MSXML - both are implementations
of the XML standard, but there is no "standard implementation".
Both conform to the subset of the XML standards we need.

By the way, we use expat in some of our projects - 
and we've never used it as anything as a black box.
It works, and it works well. We never used its "open-sourceness". 
We wrapped it with a thin layer to feel more natural to use from our code
(coding conventions, storage issues etc.)
It could have been MSXML just as well.