slumos / unlv.edu wrote:

>> extensions are built that whay, so why isn't REXML, too? At least, we
>> could fork a new project and try to implement speed critical parts of
>> code in C, I assume that would bring some serious performance
>> improvements.
> 
> I have to deal with really large (300,000 line) XML files, and REXML,
> well, just doesn't work for me.

Before anyone gets too carried away with the idea ...
we shouldn't overlook the fact that Ruby already has C based XML parsers 
- Yoshida Masato's expat based "XMLParser" package, and libgdome-ruby 
for example, Before I rushed off to -translate- a rapidly changing 
REXML package into C, I would check if these existing parsers showed 
the kind of performance advantages you are both hoping for.

Compiling to C is not always "go faster juice", as anyone who has used 
Java compilers can testify. There are some benchmarks on the XMLRuby 
site, if I remember, which showed that REXML is sometimes faster than 
naive implementations.

Aidan