RE: [xml-dev] Re: [docbook-apps] Small!! Lightweight!! xsltprocessor whi

[David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>]

Agree completely.
The statement "IT was done with ..." and "doing the same"  is entirely meaningless out of context.
Has this alleged person looked at the footprint of modern OS's which "do the same" as say DOS did with 640k?
Is he asking for exactly the same data and same output and same programmer work effort as before ?  I doubt it.

If you are in a memory and CPU constrained environment some tools and techniques don't work well.
Welcome to the real world.   As a Mobile developer for a decade or so I can attest that back  in the "Good Old Days" of Palm Programming we had to make do with not only 4MB of memory (storage AND RAM) but also a processor speed in the glacial era.
So no we didn't do XSLT or HTML for that matter.  But we did well with a customized binary XML encoding scheme and custom display rendering software.

Its all a tradeoff.   Want easy to use and debug languages ? You need some CPU and memory.
Constrained by CPU and Memory ? write a million lines of C code and limit your expectations to that which can be done without the document being fully read into memory.  And be willing to pay the programmers to work a LOT harder for a LOT longer.  Oh couple that with a backend DB infrastructure that normalizes the data efficiently for the device so you DONT have to read the whole document into memory to process it.
 
If all you want to do is what you did with "4MB Machines" you can still do that today in 4MB ... 
Oh you want Video , and full HTML5 styling, cross referencing against a GB of database and a fancy GUI ... oh well ... 
Blame the programmers.
Expectations of data size, processing and output change ... but not the processing power to support it ... funny.





----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Jirka Kosek [mailto:jirka@kosek.cz] 
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 1:23 PM
To: Dan Shelton
Cc: Jeff Chimene; DocBook Apps; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: [xml-dev] Re: [docbook-apps] Small!! Lightweight!! xslt processor which is standalone!! and runs Docbook/XSL stylesheets?

On 17.8.2012 16:31, Dan Shelton wrote:

> A colleague with two Dr. (Med/IT) and one Prof. in IT already called
> XML and XSLT "a failure" because the processing requirements have
> become insane - IT was once done with 4MB machines, doing the same
> with today's machines and XML/XSLT goes up to 400MB as minimum. And
> admittedly, I have no arguments to prove him wrong - XML processing
> takes a lot of memory (why?) and XSLT processing is... eating memory.
> Lots of memory. There doesn't seem to be a "small" solution.

I wouldn't say this is failure of XML/XSLT. Most users are not so
tightly constrained by memory so they are not pushing very hard for
memory economical implementations. So this is particulary failure of
implementations and partialy failure of users who are not demanding more
and who are not prepared to pay for more.

What's quite surprising that very efficient Java implementations like
Saxon can outperform many C-based implementations both in terms of
memory usage and performance.

However if your main objective is something small and C based you can
give a try to Sablotron (https://sourceforge.net/projects/sablotron/)
and Xalan-C (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/). It has been while since
last time I compiled them from source (more then decade) but they
definitively should have less then 80 MB of dependencies.

				Jirka

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