Third profile-guided pass (#139, docs/benchmarks.md pass 27), targeting
scanContentMarkup(), which inlines the start-tag/attribute/namespace scanners
and carries ~46% of parse time.
scanAttributeValue's opening and closing quote checks ran on the Character
path (peek + advance, buffering the quote as a Character only to compare and
discard it) on every attribute value in the document; both now check the raw
byte first, reaching the byte fast path with no Character buffering, with the
Character path kept as the off-fast-path fallback for streaming sources. The
quote bytes are ASCII and non-CR/LF, so the raw byte and the normalized
stream agree, the same reasoning peekByte's other callers already rely on.
NamespaceContext.checkExpandedNames allocated a Set's native storage and
built a concatenated URI+local key string per element even when at most one
attribute carries a namespace URI, where no duplicate is possible (the
default namespace never applies to attributes, and xmlns declarations carry
no URI). Counting URI-bearing attributes first, with no allocation, and
returning early below two skips all of it on the overwhelming majority of
elements; for xml:* attributes specifically the key exceeded the small-string
limit, so this also removes a real per-element heap allocation.
EntityDecoder.decode/decodeLenient guarded with raw.contains("&"), a
grapheme-by-grapheme walk to find one ASCII byte, once per ampersand-bearing
text node or attribute value; raw.utf8.contains(0x26) finds the same byte
without decoding graphemes, the same shape as checkNameShape's colon check.
The quote-handling extraction into two helpers also resolves the cyclomatic
complexity the inline version tripped. Six new regression tests pin the
quote edge cases (empty value, single-quoted, a quote kind nested inside the
other, unterminated at end of input) plus byte/Character-path agreement for
each in the parser path differential.
Verified: full local suite (1858 tests) and full W3C XSTS suite (14383
groups) pass unchanged. Parse ~6.00x -> ~4.75x versus libxml2 at the
20000-item corpus, best of 5.
The attribute-value scanner ran the entity decoder on every value, and the
decoder re-scanned the whole value for '&' before doing nothing when none
was present. The byte-run scanner already visits every value byte, so it
now notes any '&' and an ampersand-free value (the common case) returns its
normalized run directly. Measured against a same-machine-state baseline,
every run came in below every baseline run, ~4% faster parse on the
20k-item generated corpus.
Move the bulk byte-run scanners (contentRunBytes, attributeRunBytes) into
ReaderByteRuns.swift and centralize their cursor mutation through a single
advanceByteRun method, so Reader's position fields stay write-encapsulated
in Reader.swift while both files stay under the length cap. The byte and
Character paths are held to identical decoded values by the differential
oracle, extended with ampersand-free, entity, and character-reference
attribute cases. No spec behavior changed.
Keep the reader on its byte fast path through dispatch and name/attribute
scanning so plain-ASCII documents avoid the per-Character String machinery
(String.Iterator.next, string comparison, small-string materialization,
bridge-object ARC) that a profile indicted as the parse bottleneck.
The root cause was that a single buffered lookahead Character defeated every
existing byte path, each of which requires an empty buffer, and the content,
markup, and attribute dispatch each peeked a Character before scanning. Add a
non-buffering peekByte for dispatch, a byte-mode skipSpace, an all-ASCII
takeASCIIName, and an attributeRunBytes bulk scanner (with the 3.3.3
whitespace-to-space transform, deferring any carriage return to the Character
path so CRLF is not double-counted). Detect a text run's closing '<' via
peekByte instead of buffering it, which had cascaded the next element's whole
dispatch and name scan onto the slow path. Skip reference decoding for
ampersand-free text. The Character path remains the exact fallback for a
streaming source, spliced entity text, and any non-ASCII byte; the two paths
share scanContentMarkup so they cannot diverge.
Measured parse 20.1x -> 9.5x slower than libxml2 on the 20k-item generated
corpus, roughly a 53 percent wall-clock reduction. A differential oracle pins
the byte and Character paths to identical event streams and error marks over
an adversarial corpus, alongside boundary tests. Verified against the full
local suite, the Apache Xalan XSLT gold-output corpus, the W3C XML conformance
corpora, the RELAX NG spec suite, and the WASM build. No spec behavior changed.
