[Python-Dev] Performance of various marshallers

[Paul Prescod]

I apologize if I embarassed Shilad. I don't know him so I don't know how
he will take a public critique of his code. For all I know, he agrees
with me and merely hasn't got around to adding in an XML parser.

On the one hand, I can see how it would be nicer to discuss it directly
with you and him, but on the other, it is a real technical issue that
deserves public discussion.

I felt (and feel) that you've made a technical mistake in attributing
py-xmlrpc's speed to its having a fixed tagset and I only posted code to
demonstrate where the real speedup comes from. I've spent my whole life
working around bugs in hand-rolled XML (and SGML) parsers that are
supposed to be faster than general ones but end up not being so. I react
almost as intemperately when someone tells me that their app embeds a
new scripting language that they invented over the weekend.

Although I do think that the current parsing approach taken in py-xmlrpc
is flawed, I do think that the overall idea is good. It makes sense to
parse XML-RPC purely in C without using Python callbacks.

 Paul Prescod