Re: code bloat [was Re: Semaphore assembly-code bug]

[Tim Hockin <thockin@hockin.org>]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 06:44:10PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Tim Hockin wrote:
> >So you end up with the mindset of, for example, "if it's text it's XML".
> >You have to parse everything as XML, when simple parsers would be tons
> >faster and simpler and smaller.
> 
> 
> hehehe.  One of the reasons why I like XML is that you don't have to 
> keep cloning new parsers.

I'm fine with XML, when it makes sense.  In fact, I wrote an XML parser.
It's blazingly fast.  But it doesn't try to do everything for everyone.
It does just as much as I needed.  And Whn I need XML, I don;t have any
problem linking it in.  It's only a couple hundred lines of C.

What irks me is best demonstrated by this:

At OLS last year or the year before, at a talk about DBUS, someone asked
about the DBUS protocol.  When told that it was binary, they asked if
there was any advantage to that over text.  The reply "We didn't want to
link an XML parser in".

Now, I am fine with not wanting to ad bloat.  But umm, the question was
about TEXT, not XML.  They are not the same thing.  Not all text should be
XML.