[This message was posted by Brandon Yuille of BWY Systems <[email protected]> to the "FAST Protocol" discussion forum at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/46. You can reply to it on-line at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/ac712b7c - PLEASE DO NOT REPLY BY MAIL.]
After seeing a lot of complaints about FAST on this forum, I'd first like to say to the creators that I personally like FAST encoding. At first I was taken aback by the complexity, which I think is the source of most complaints. However once I had a full understanding of the specification, I realized the beauty of FAST and without it's complexity it would never be able to accomplish what it does. I do have one comment or question though... Why does the template id field come after the PMAP? Is there an implementation of FAST which does not use templates? The reason I ask is because in my FAST decoder there is no way I can figure to decode without first looping through the PMAP to see if the template id is present, looking for the stop bit, extracting the template id, then starting all over (now that I know the template id) and reparsing the PMAP along with skipping over the template id. To me this seems inefficient to loop through the same bytes twice. Everywhere else my decoder never touches the same bytes twice. I really can't figure there is a solution to this, but maybe I'm wrong? Anyway, if there was one change I could make, that would be to have the template id be a mandatory field which precedes the PMAP and also remove the template id bit from the PMAP. [You can unsubscribe from this discussion group by sending a message to mailto:[email protected]] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Financial Information eXchange" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fix-protocol?hl=en.
