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Re: Best practice for data encoding?

2006-06-12 03:33:51
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

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