New SAXON release 4.4

A new release of the SAXON XSL interpreter and compiler (version 4.4) is
available, at a new URL: http://users.iclway.co.uk/mhkay/saxon/

I decided that with the new July 9 spec out, it was a good time to
checkpoint. This release has very few new features but greatly improved
performance. It still implements the April 21 spec.

As an example of the performance boost, Oren Ben-Kiki's 8-queens stylesheet
previously took 75 seconds when interpreted and 21 seconds when compiled. It
now takes 12 seconds interpreted and 8.5 seconds compiled.

For stylesheets that are less computationally intensive the saving is
smaller, but still significant. One note of caution however: for simple
stylesheets that do little more than a single serial pass through the source
document, the benefit of compiling is now very small.

Mike Kay


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list