[Mono-list] Re: [Mono-devel-list] Managed XSLT release

[Ben Maurer]

On Thu, 2003-12-25 at 09:25, Francisco Figueiredo Jr. wrote:
> > What is Managed XSLT you ask? Once a long, long time ago (about one
> > yearish) there was a little boy. His name was Ben, he was 15 years old.
> > Ben was a Mono hacker. He had finished up optimizing BigInteger. The
> > [...]
> > 
> 
> Woow! Very nice to know how things get started. :)
> 
> One of the most impressive things I remember about Ben was how fast he 
> did some xslt implementations. In the go-mono site there is a news about 
> Ben starting the implementation and another news (11 days later) talking 
> about Ben already have it implemented!! It was pretty fast! :)

Well, thats not the complete story. Miguel was late to put up the first
notice (remember, he thought this was going to take me two years :). He
managed to get the `Ben ran something' up in less than a day.

Also, my first runs were hacks. Eg, I was skipping around hard parts
(template resolution) to get to the easy parts.

As well, XSLT was very easy for a few reasons:
      * Most of the language is XPath. XPath itself is much bigger than
        XSLT. Compare to a version of MCS where you only have to handle
        statements (eg, loops, if's, etc) and the expressions are done
        for you.
      * You dont have to write a parser, it is the xml reader engine.

I would also like to give some thank yous to two people who helped me
along the way:

Atsushi -- Thanks for the wonderful initial design. It got me thinking.
Thanks also for the dedicated attention, it has helped over the last few
months. Thanks for working on the engine over the last months. You have
greatly improved it, it is now truely production ready.

Miguel -- Thank you for believing in me, well, after I got off the
ground :). Thanks for the help with thinking about designing the
variable storage in XSLT, your input really helped me here. Thank you
also for always asking `how can I help you.' Thanks for getting Atsushi
help when I was unable to actively maintin XSLT during the school year.
Finally, thank you for letting me force all the Monodoc users to dogfood
my XSLT engine. Monodoc helped me clear out some of the biggest XSLT
bugs. It also inspired me to get the engine up to the performance level
it has now.

Merry Christmas,
-- Ben