Re: Best practice for data encoding?

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>]

On 8-jun-2006, at 11:13, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> > But it's a clear trade-off between efficient representation and  
> > complexity for the developer - we've had this debate once already  
> > in this thread, I think. The more complex the representation, the  
> > harder it is to code correctly and debug.

> Simple/complex isn't the same as text/binary. I'm pretty sure a  
> programmer armed with nothing more than a standard issue C compiler  
> and the basic libraries that come with it, would have a harder time  
> parsing XML than something like the DNS protocol. But my point was  
> that the resulting code would be slower. I know it's very old- 
> fashioned to even consider such things, but there are places where  
> performance is important beyond just philosophical objections  
> against bloat.

A little post script to this discussion: I wrote a few small test  
programs in C to evaluate the performance of reading integers from a  
text file using <stdio.h> versus doing the same with direct read()s  
from a binary file. The difference is between two and three orders of  
magnitude. See http://ablog.apress.com/?p=1146

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf