[XML-SIG] Great Reason for 4Suite Release delay

[Uche Ogbuji]

We were expecting to have 4XSLT 0.9.2, etc. out late last week, but as
always, our hacking instincts got in the way of the "release early,
release often" philosophy.  We started optimizing and couldn't stop.

As of now, on several of our benchmark documents, 4XSLT is now 100 times
faster than release 0.9.1.  Yes, I meant 100.  One 200K document that
used to take 5 minutes to render now takes 3 seconds.  Not all documents
show such dramatic improvement but the smallest speedup we've seen for
any somewhat normal stylesheets and documents is well over ten-fold.

We're not even yet done with the optimizations, but it's not
inconceivable that 4XSLT is as fast as any of the Java processors.  It's
typically within 10% of saxon.

At any rate, we hope to soon get on with the packaging so our users can
get the benefits.

Thanks.

-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python