A path that is a single forward-axis step from one context node returns its
nodes already in document order with no duplicates, so the document-order
sort is redundant. AxisNavigation produces the structural forward axes
(child, descendant, descendant-or-self, self, following, following-sibling)
in document order, deriving sibling order from the same children array the
order key compares, so the two can never disagree. This is the common shape
after //x compiles and fuses to a single descendant::x step.
The attribute axis (whose order interleaves with namespace declarations), the
namespace axis (produced in dictionary order), and every reverse axis
(nearest-first) are excluded and still sorted. Measured xpath ~7% faster on
the 20k-item generated corpus via a same-state A/B, identical results.
XPathSingleStepOrderTests pins document order for each included axis, that the
reverse axes still normalize, and that multi-step paths still sort. An
adversarial order-correctness review found no query whose order or uniqueness
the change breaks.
Each location step accumulated its context nodes' axis results into a
Set<Node> to drop nodes reachable from more than one context, hashing and
copying every node. The wrapped TreeNode is reference-counted, so each copy
is ARC traffic, and the profile showed the Set insert, hashing, and Node
copies dominating evaluation.
De-duplication is needed only when two distinct context nodes can reach the
same node. Skip it on a single context and on the axes whose results are
disjoint per context (child, attribute, namespace, self): those produce the
identical node sequence the Set would, since every insertion succeeds, with
no hashing. Keep the Set on the axes that genuinely overlap (descendant,
ancestor, parent, the siblings, following/preceding). Predicates stay applied
per context and the path result still passes through the final
order-and-unique pass, so results are identical.
Measured xpath ~13x to ~10x slower than libxml2 on the 20k-item generated
corpus via a same-state A/B, ~28% faster, same result. XPathNodeSetDedupTests
pins that a node shared by many contexts through ancestor/parent/descendant
is still counted once, the disjoint axes return every distinct result, and an
overlapping union still de-duplicates. The full XPath suite and the Apache
Xalan XSLT gold-output corpus stay green.
Rebuild the XPath engine on the parent-aware tree. Add an XPath node
abstraction (tree, attribute, namespace) with document order, and navigate
all thirteen axes: child, descendant, parent, ancestor, following-sibling,
preceding-sibling, following, preceding, attribute, namespace, self,
descendant-or-self, ancestor-or-self. Support the ./../@/// abbreviations
and processing-instruction() node tests. Reverse axes number nearest-first
for positional predicates; results return de-duplicated in document order.
The attribute axis excludes xmlns declarations; the namespace axis surfaces
in-scope namespace nodes.
Closes#40
Add PureXML.XPath: a compiled location-path query engine reimplemented from the
XPath 1.0 specification; no upstream code copied.
- Compiler parses a path into steps; Evaluator walks the tree returning a
Selection node-set (node or attribute) in document order.
- Forward axes only (child, descendant //, self ., attribute @), since the value
model has no parent pointers. Node tests: name, *, text(), node(), comment().
Predicates: [n], [@a], [@a='v'], [child], [child='v'].
- Public surface: XPath.Query (init compiles, evaluate/elements/strings), the
Selection enum (element / stringValue), QueryError, and the one-shot
PureXML.xpath(_:over:). Upward/sibling axes and the full expression language
are explicitly out of scope.
- 12 XPath tests; 61 total.
