Re: XML libs (was Re: gconf backend)

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

On Sun, 2003-09-28 at 11:21, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 01:57:31AM -0700, Evan Martin wrote:
> > /* it appears there's no way to attach a pointer to a libXML
> > * parser context,
> 
>   This has been fixed, there is now a _private field for this. Once
> it got asked for that was done. But who asked for it ? Not the GNOME
> people ... and they never heard about the fact that this was added,
> why ? 

	:-) goodness, I was using _private in Gnome 1.4's bonobo-ui-node.c.

	Anyhow - I do tend to think that Havoc is asking for some reasonable
things; most people don't have the passion for XML in itself that you
have, and just want to get on with other things. Thus simple APIs that
serialise data to / from 'XML' - where 'XML' is a placeholder for some
human-readable, xml-like, structured storage format is all most people
want. Of course, I guess gconf/ has moved this further away from most
people which is good I guess.

	Either way - the best memory savings we got in bonobo-activation-server
(using SAX aside) were gained by throwing away redundant locale
information; AFAIR gconf schemas have the "cram all translations in one
file" approach that many other Gnome bits have. Simply tracking which
locales have been used and throwing away all other strings [and of
course re-parsing everything with new-locales (a very uncommon case)],
saved us a chunk of RAM.

	We also saved lots of memory in libbonoboui by moving to the libxml2
SAX parser, and using an internal representation that could use Quark
storage / compares for attrs, and shrunk the node footprint - at the
expense of representing only the sub-set we were interested in.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot