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.
A path expression sorted its result into document order through orderUnique,
which first ran a Set-based de-duplication. But evaluateSteps already returns
a duplicate-free node-set: each step de-duplicates across its context nodes,
or uses an axis whose per-context results cannot overlap. So that Set copied
every node for nothing, and each copy retains the wrapped tree node, whose
weak parent reference forces a side table and the slow reference-counting
path.
Path and trailing-path evaluation now sort the steps' result directly.
Unions and filter primaries, which genuinely can carry duplicates, keep the
de-duplicating pass. Measured xpath ~9% faster on the 20k-item generated
corpus via a same-state A/B, identical results. The existing node-set
de-duplication and union tests cover that a path still yields each node once.
`//X` compiles to `descendant-or-self::node()/child::X`, which materializes
every node of the subtree as an intermediate context before selecting the X
children of each. Fuse that pair into a single `descendant::X` step at compile
time: the two select the same node-set, so evaluation skips the intermediate.
The fusion is transparent except for a positional predicate: `//x[1]` is the
first x child of EACH parent, not the first x in document order, so it must
not become `descendant::x[1]`. Apply the rewrite only when every predicate is
provably non-positional: its value is a boolean, node-set, or string (never a
number, which XPath reads as position() = value) and it nowhere references
position() or last(). Anything not provably both is left unfused, so a result
can never change.
Measured xpath ~10x to ~7x slower than libxml2 on the 20k-item generated
corpus via a same-state A/B, identical results. XPathDescendantFusionTests
pins the positional forms keeping their per-parent meaning, the non-positional
forms selecting across the subtree, and composition with trailing and nested
steps. An adversarial differential review (fused versus a spec-literal unfused
reference over nine attack suites) found no query whose result changes. The
boolean-function allowlist carries a documented invariant: every entry must be
position- and size-independent, since the position scan is syntactic.
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.
The serializer's escaping functions rebuilt every text, attribute, comment,
and processing-instruction value character by character, even when the value
contained nothing to escape, which is the common case. Each now scans the
value's UTF-8 bytes for the bytes it would escape (the markup characters, the
active attribute quote, the whitespace characters, a comment hyphen, a PI
question mark, and any non-ASCII byte in ASCII-only mode) and returns the
value unchanged when none is present, taking the original character path only
when something must be escaped.
Measured serialize roughly halved, ~5.5x to ~2.7x slower than libxml2 on the
20k-item generated corpus, with byte-identical output. EscapingFastPathTests
pins both the unchanged fast path and the escaped slow path for each function,
and the Apache Xalan XSLT gold-output corpus (a serialize-heavy differential)
stays green. No output changed.
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.
The element-content markup dispatch ran up to five literal string
comparisons (</, <!--, <![CDATA[, <?, <!DOCTYPE) before the start-tag
branch won, a per-element cost the parse profile indicted as
Reader.matchesBytes. Branch instead on the single byte after '<' on the
byte fast path: '/' end tag, '?' processing instruction, '!' a
declaration, otherwise a start tag.
The Character path keeps the equivalent matches()-based dispatch for a
streaming source or spliced entity text, and a '<!' that matches none of
comment/CDATA/DOCTYPE still falls through to the start-tag scanner with
the same expectedName error. Measured parse ~9.5x -> ~9.0x slower than
libxml2 on the 20k-item corpus; the byte and Character paths are held
identical by ParserPathDifferentialTests over its adversarial corpus,
and the Xalan, W3C, and RELAX NG suites stay green. 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.
EventReader.next(), both initializers, and the Event alias are public
(an internal typealias in a split file had been shadowing the public
Parsing.Event); a new PureXMLPublicAPITests target compiles without
testable import so facade gaps fail CI. The large-corpus benchmarks
exposed document-order sorting as quadratic on flat fan-outs; the fix's
first attempt was itself worse (an eager sibling table built per
predicate evaluation), caught by sampling the live run, and replaced
with a lazy table: single-node sets never touch order keys and a
parent's table builds on its second lookup. XPath at 42 MB drops
27.1 s to 1.57 s (190x to 11.7x); at 210 MB PureXML completes in 9.4 s
the query libxml2 refuses at its 10M node-set cap (#143 tracks our
configurable budget). Benchmark harness: size series to 210 MB, CORPUS
mode for real files (NASA, SwissProt measured), SAX stage,
refusal-aware table, NULL-safe C driver. All conformance suites,
Linux, and WASM verified. Closes#142.
String input copies its UTF-8 once into owned storage (an unsafe
pointer encapsulated in a class lifetime, never escaping the parser)
and scalars decode straight off the pointer, eliminating the
per-character closure chain; ASCII literals match and consume at the
byte level; and plain-ASCII character data scans as a single byte run
with one String built per run. Parse drops 32 percent cumulative
(0.49 s to 0.34 s on the 4.2 MB corpus, libxml2 ratio 30x to 20x).
The W3C suite caught one boundary (a run starting with '>' could
swallow the ]]> check after the character path consumed ]]); the run
scanner leaves a leading '>' to the character path, pinned as a unit
regression. All conformance suites, Linux, and WASM verified.
matches() ran on every scan decision and materialized an Array of the
literal per call, the hottest comparison in the parse profile. It now
walks the literal directly. Parse time on the 4.2 MB benchmark corpus
drops 16 percent (0.49 s to 0.41 s, libxml2 ratio 30x to 26x); profile
findings and the optimization log recorded in docs/benchmarks.md.
scripts/benchmark.sh generates a deterministic corpus, builds PureXML
in release and a C driver against the SDK's libxml2, times parse,
serialize, and XPath over the same bytes (best-of-N, internal timing,
IO excluded), cross-checks the same XPath count on both sides, and
prints the comparison. First honest baseline recorded in
docs/benchmarks.md: parse ~30x, xpath ~36x, serialize ~5x slower than
libxml2 on a 4.2 MB corpus; these are the numbers #139's optimization
passes burn down. The SAX stage isolation is blocked on #142 (the
public streaming surface is internal, found by this harness).
