For JRuby this has little to no benefits as it uses strings for method names.
However, both MRI and Rubinius will perform a Symbol lookup whenever rb_intern()
is called. By doing this once for all callback names and caching the resulting
VALUE objects the lexer timings can be reduced by about 25%. In case of the
benchmark benchmark/xml/lexer/string_average_bench.rb this means it runs in
around 500ms instead of 700ms.
Instead of storing "act" and "cs" as an instance variable they (along with some
other variables) are now stored in a struct. This struct is attached to a lexer
instance using the (crappy) Data_Get_Struct/Data_Wrap_Struct API.
Haven't bumped into any problems just yet. However, in theory all sorts of evil
could happen here. Which is part of the problem of C: so much shit is undefined
behaviour that you can take a single step and fall in 15 holes at the same time.
In theory, because nobody bothered to actually specify it properly.
Instead of relying on String#count for counting newlines in text nodes, Oga now
does this in C/Java. String#count isn't exactly the fastest way of counting
characters. Performance was measured using
benchmark/xml/lexer/string_average_bench.rb. Before this patch the results were
as following:
MRI: 0.529s
Rbx: 4.965s
JRuby: 0.622s
After this patch:
MRI: 0.424s
Rbx: 1.942s
JRuby: 0.665s => numbers vary a bit, seem roughly the same as before
The commands used for benchmarking:
$ rake clean # to make sure that C exts aren't shared between MRI/Rbx
$ rake generate
$ rake fixtures
$ ruby benchmark/xml/lexer/string_average_bench.rb
The big difference for Rbx is probably due to the implementation of String#count
not being super fast. Some changes were made
(https://github.com/rubinius/rubinius/pull/3133) to the method, but this hasn't
been released yet.
JRuby seems to perform in a similar way, so either it was already optimizing
things for me or I suck at writing well performing Java code.
This fixes#51.
The previous setup would consume too much. For example the following HTML:
<a><!--foo--><b><!--bar--></b></a>
would result in the following T_COMMENT token:
"foo--><b><!--bar"
The new setup requires the marking of a start position. I'm not a huge fan of
this but there doesn't appear to be a way around this.
Using IO/StringIO objects one can parse large XML files without first having to
read the entire file into memory. This can potentially save a lot of memory at
the cost of a slightly slower runtime.
For IO like instances the lexer will consume the input line by line. If a
String is given it's consumed as a whole instead. A small side effect of
reading the input line by line is that text such as "foo\nbar" will be lexed as
two tokens instead of one.
Fixes#19.
Instead of directly accessing the `data` instance variable the C/Java code now
uses the method `read_data`. This is part of one of the various steps required
to allow Oga to read data from IO like instances. It also means I can freely
change the name of the instance variable without also having to change the
C/Java code.
Yorick Peterse