The descendant and descendant-or-self axes built the full subtree node list
and then filtered it by the step's node test. For a //name query over a wide
document most of the wrapped nodes were discarded immediately, and each wrap
retains a tree node whose weak parent forces the slow reference-counting path.
Run the node test against the raw tree node during the walk, so a rejected
node is never wrapped. matches(_:_:on:namespaces:) now delegates, for a tree
node, to a new tree-node matchesTree (one source of truth, exercised by the
full XPath suite), and the descendant walk applies it as a keep filter. The
node-set, document order, and uniqueness are identical to build-then-filter;
only non-matching nodes are no longer materialized.
Measured xpath ~11% faster on the 20k-item generated corpus via a same-state
A/B (count unchanged at 10000). XPathFusedDescendantTests covers every
node-test kind through the fused path, and an adversarial equivalence review
found no query whose result changes. Full suite, Apache Xalan XSLT gold
output, and the WASM build stay green.
Mihaela Mihaljevic
52eee325bd