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

[J C L. <cl...@ka...>]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 21:53:36 +0100 
Alen Ladavac <ale...@cr...> wrote:

> Nope, you missed the boat. :) 

Damn, I'm gonna fire that ranging scout!

> The idea is that XML is a generic format, freeing you from writing
> your parser. 

Precisely.

> There is no much point storing plain blobs inside XML. Then, you can
> just dump it with fwrite() as well. 

Dumping a blob in XML really isn't that much more difficult.  You either
drop it inline as a base64 or as a MIME attachment in base64.  The data
size grows by 30% of course, but that's expected as a text
representation.

> But the question is: If you save your vertices in x="1" y="0"...etc
> format, can that still load as fast as if you just dump
> 3f8000000000000...etc? 

Of course not.  

  double foo[large_number];
  ...
  read (h, foo, sizeof (foo[0]) * large_number)

Is necessarily going to be cheaper than parsing an XML structure of
large_number doubles.  The only question is whether the added expense is
worth it on some level.  If you're shaving instructions...

> People started to argue that the verboseness of the format doesn't
> hinder its performance. I say, ok, it might be possible, but show me
> the numbers. Didn't see any yet. :/

Frankly and numbers you see need to be treated with a lot of salt, even
the ones I post.  It is a simple enough thing to test with whatever
parser you pick.  

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
cl...@ka...               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.