[Gestalt-users] News

[Colin P. A. <co...@co...>]

I thought I'd just provide an update of the development situation.

The current CVS code is now close to the expected Candidate
Recommendation (Basic XSLT processor).

Apart from any undiscovered bugs, the following areas are known not to
be compliant:

    * Serializer does not yet support UTF-16 as an output encoding,
        nor does it support Unicode normalization. 
    * Regular expressions do not yet support Unicode data (ASCII
        only). Also Unicode digits are not yet supported for xsl:number
        and format-date/datetime/time functions. 
    * The functions unparsed-text() and and unparsed-text-available()
        do not work properly yet. They will probably work OK for 7-bit
        ASCII and UTF-8 files. 
    * The function normalize-unicode() has not been implemented yet.

I should very soon be starting an Eiffel programming job on
Windows. This means I will be in a position to release win32 and .NET
binaries soon.

If anyone is interested, I could release an up-to-date Linux binary,
compiled with the free edition of the ISE compiler. This means a
splash screen gets written to stdout, but you can always redirect
stdout to /dev/null and use the --output option to direct the
transformation output to a file.

Alternatively, I could use the VE compiler - but this produces much
slower executables.
Unfortunately, the GPLed SmartEiffel compilers are all a bit buggy
now, so I cannot produce a fast-running executable with any version of
them at the moment. I think this is the only compiler I can use on Mac
OS/X at the moment, otherwise I would have tested gestalt against
Bruce's bibliography stuff.

At the moment I am writing a utility program to generate Eiffel
Unicode routines from the Unicode database (4.1). This will enable me
to fix the xsl:number etc. problem.
The next stage is to write a Unicode-aware regular expression engine
so I can fix those bits.
Finally UTF-16 output will be fairly easy to do, but as this
abomination is no use to mankind, I leave it to last.

I hope to be able to release compliant binaries by Christmas.

Performance has greatly improved since alpha 2 release - it continues
however to be about 7 times faster than Saxon for short (0 - 4
seconds) transformations, thereafter getting progressively slower
(maybe 5 times slower for long running (over 10 minutes) transformations).
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire