The descendant and attribute walks tested every candidate node through a
closure that called matchesTree / matchesAttribute with the step's NodeTest and
the evaluation namespaces dictionary:
descendants(of: tree) { matchesTree($0, step.test, on: step.axis, context.namespaces) }
That passes the namespaces dictionary (and the NodeTest's associated string) by
value on every call, so a //name-style query over a wide document carried a
dictionary retain/release on each of tens of thousands of nodes, on the
traversal that dominates evaluation.
compiledTreeTest, compiledAttributeTest, and compiledNodeTest resolve the parts
that do not change as the walk moves (the axis principal kind, whether eval-time
bindings are in effect, the prefix-wildcard shape of the name) exactly once and
return a tight per-node closure capturing only the local name. The selected
nodes are identical to the unfused matchesTree / matchesAttribute / matches.
Measured xpath ~35% faster on the 20k-item generated corpus via a same-state
A/B, from ~2.0x to ~1.3x slower than libxml2. The full suite, the Apache Xalan
XSLT gold-output corpus, and the WASM build stay green. XPathCompiledNodeTestTests
is an exhaustive differential asserting each compiled closure equals the
function it specializes across every node, test, axis, and binding.
