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Re: Microsoft FUD on binary XML...

• To: bob@w...
• Subject: Re: Microsoft FUD on binary XML...
• From: Alaric B Snell <alaric@a...>
• Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 11:11:00 +0000
• Cc: 'Dennis Sosnoski' <dms@s...>,'Jeff Lowery' <Jeff.Lowery@c...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <001401c3afc4$c3c479b0$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• References: <001401c3afc4$c3c479b0$650aa8c0@BOBDEV>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030704 Debian/1.4-1

Bob Wyman wrote:

> 	Another thing to consider is the potential cost in converting
> data to address things like "endian" concerns. If you have to flip the
> bits in every number you get and you have many numbers, this can get
> expensive.

Hmmm... nowhere near as expensive as parsing those numbers from base 10 
ASCII :-) A 32-bit endian swap in x86 assembly is not many instructions 
- can't remember how many offhand, but not many. And it will execute in 
constant time, whereas a base 10 decoder will take time linearly 
dependant on the number of digits in the number :-)

 > Similarly, converting from a "standard" floating point
> representation to some different representation supported by your
> machine or language might be expensive.

That has more scope for expense but, again, I can't see it ever being 
worse than converting from a base 10 ASCII encoding of the same number.

 > Also, if it turns out that
> your application is primarily concerned with large strings, then a
> binary format can deliver very disappointing results. 

Yep, if we enclosed this entire email in <e> and </e> to make it into 
XML, then the PER equivelant would be something like a 2-byte 
variable-length integer encoding the message length followed by the text 
of the message - a meager saving of 5 bytes out of a couple of K.

> 
> 		bob wyman
> 

ABS

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