Hi Joseph,

On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 8:27 PM Joseph Kesselman <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> IBM followed Xalan with an XSLT3 optimizing compiler, which was almost a 
> complete rewrite. Unfortunately, it was only released as part of Websphere, 
> and was not donated to Apache. (I think it's released name was xthpc or 
> something like that, XSL Transformation for High Performance Computing; the 
> internal name was Xylem.)
>
> And we had another major step forward in progress when we were summarily 
> pulled off that effort.
>
> Internal politics, headcount raids between departments, disagreement about 
> how we were going to position our new acquisition of DataPower. And the new 
> management had no interest in donating it to Apache.
>
> .. so, yeah, most of the world never heard about it and had no access to it, 
> and it basically got dropped on the floor and forgotten. And there are few of 
> us who even remember it.
>
> Obviously I'm still a bit grumpy about that...
>
> I'm not sure how much of that work was patented or if IBM would give Apache a 
> free license to those.
>
>
> One conclusion drawn from that effort: The non-deterministic behavior of JIT 
> compilers make performance optimization extremely difficult. Simple 
> run-to-run variation swamped some of the measurements we were trying to make. 
> It's a lot easier to optimize in a J9 system or similar, where the JVM 
> behavior is more predictable.

Thanks for your perspective, about these issues.

I've a strong feeling that, our work on XalanJ dev repos branch
xalan-j_xslt3.0, has high chances to achieve very good XSLT 3.0 and
XPath 3.1 conformance, in due course.


-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi

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