On 8-jun-2006, at 9:50, Dave Cridland wrote:
I've long harbored the suspicion that a large percentage of the cycles in today's fast CPUs are burned up parsing various types of text. Does anyone know of any processing efficiency comparisons between binary and text based protocols?
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.
Now I understand why it takes me up to 10 minutes to download a handful of 1 - 2 kbyte emails with IMAP (+SSL) over a 9600 bps GSM data connection.
I can write an efficient IMAP client, and give it away for free, but I can't force you to use it. :-)
It's not that I'm a huge fan of Apple's Mail but it's the only GUI mail application I've found so far that I can actually work with without the irresistible urge to chew through the mouse cable and dust off my VT420 terminal... (Which allows me to read my mail with Pine without any trouble over 9600 bps.)
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