Re: switching to XFastParser

Hi Noel,

On Thu, 2016-03-31 at 14:11 +0200, Noel Grandin wrote:
> [Including the original off-list discussion below for context for anyone who cares]

        =)

> So I took a look a Daniel Sikeler's branch at
>     https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=feature/fastparser
> and it looks like he did a pretty thorough job of converting everything to XFastParser.

        So - I've asked a GSOC student to re-do this work; starting from
scratch and adopt an incremental approach instead.

> What was the reason this did not get merged?

        There was no time to mentor it, no-one reviewed the code, the potential
for large-scale regression is huge, the parsing code creeps out of
xmloff/ into the components etc.

> Would it suffice to simply pull the commits out of this tree one-by-one,
> dust them off, pretty them up, verify them through 'make check' and push
> them to master?

        I think not; since it is not an incremental approach. It is an "all or
nothing" and I'm deeply skeptical of that.

        So - I've asked 'Azorpid' to submit an incremental approach for GSOC.
So we start by implementing the legacy parsing interfaces in terms of
the new XFastParser. That should get us some performance win, and then
we can start to use the tokanized XFastParser API to replace the xmloff/
custom tokenization and incrementally re-purpose Daniel's work patch by
patch.

        That was my plan; I'd love some help mentoring and working alongside
that task though ! it would be great to accelerate the move there.

        ATB,

                Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@collabora.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot