Join the dark side, Jay. You know you want to. ;)
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Yeah; and which processor that XML<->WT conversion happened on would be critical for load reasons...
Well, I wouldn't expect WT -> XML to be any slower than our current parser (we could just modify it to output the XML instead of the wikitext); actually, it would be quite a lot faster, no doubt, because all sorts of things like template substitutions wouldn't have to occur. So it would probably be slow but manageable.
XML -> WT should be virtually instantaneous, as should XML -> HTML, because parse time would be one-pass at C speed (so probably a few milliseconds or less, as opposed to 800 ms for the current parser). There would of course be all sorts of weirdness in XML -> WT, so it might not be as fast as XML -> HTML, but the WMF gets a *hell* of a lot more cache misses on page views than on page edits, I would bet a substantial sum of money.