I decided not to do this in a previous commit because I had documented
"NodeStream" elsewhere, so I'd like it to be in the Git history to
understand its evolution.
This never was a "Node" stream beyond the initial concept phase, because it
represents tokens that aren't themselves nodes. It is intended to generate
XML nodes, but may need to accommodate non-nodes (e.g. XML declarations) in
the future.
The name originated from `Node`, which was a tree-based IR that was
initially conceived, but removed because it's not yet needed. What we need
is a streaming IR for xmle writing, and then for reading and echoing back
out XML for the new frontend.
This is a working streaming IR for XML. I want to get this committed before
I go further cleaning it up and integrating it into the xmle writer.
This is lacking detailed documentation, and the names of things may end up
changing.
Initial benchmarks do show that it has a ~2x performance improvement over
quick-xml when dealing with two attributes on a node, and I suspect that
improvement will increase with the number of attributes. We will see how it
compares in real-world benchmarks once the linker has been modified to use
it.
The goal isn't to _avoid_ quick-xml---it'll be used in the future for things
like escaping that would be a huge waste to implement ourselves. It just so
happened that quick-xml was not beneficial for these changes; indeed, its
own writer is fairly simple for the portions that were implemented here, so
there's no use in fighting with its API, particularly around attributes and
our need to explicitly control whitespace (with the intent of handling code
formatters in the future).
To put this into perspective: the reason this work is being done isn't to
refactor the linker, or to speed it up, but to generalize XML writing and
provide a suitable IR for use in the compiler. The first step of the
frontend is to essentially echo the XML token stream back out so we can
incrementally parse it and do something useful, to incrementally rewrite the
compiler in Rust.
Mike Gerwitz