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XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web

(github.com)
392 points _kush | 1 comments | 27 Jun 25 05:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.874s | source
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badmintonbaseba ◴[27 Jun 25 08:37 UTC] No.44394985[source]▶
I have worked for a company that (probably still is) heavily invested in XSLT for XML templating. It's not good, and they would probably migrate from it if they could.

  1. Even though there are newer XSLT standards, XSLT 1.0 is still dominant. It is quite limited and weird compared to the newer standards.

  2. Resolving performance problems of XSLT templates is hell. XSLT is a Turing-complete functional-style language, with performance very much abstracted away. There are XSLT templates that worked fine for most documents, but then one document came in with a ~100 row table and it blew up. Turns out that the template that processed the table is O(N^2) or worse, without any obvious way to optimize it (it might even have an XPath on each row that itself is O(N) or worse). I don't exactly know how it manifested, but as I recall the document was processed by XSLT for more than 7 minutes.
JS might have other problems, but not being able to resolve algorithmic complexity issues is not one of them.
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nithril ◴[27 Jun 25 11:15 UTC] No.44395839[source]▶
XSLT/XPath have evolved since XSLT 1.0.

Features are now available like key (index) to greatly speedup the processing. Good XSLT implementation like Saxon definitively helps as well on the perf aspect.

When it comes to transform XML to something else, XSLT is quite handy by structuring the logic.

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1. amy214 ◴[28 Jun 25 01:39 UTC] No.44401752[source]▶
Just to add to this, we know have XXSLT which solves a lot of the original problems with XSLT.

Just to frame this people, imagine a JSON-based programming language for transforming JSON files into other JSON files and the program is also in JSON and turing complete. Now imagine it's not JSON but XML! Now any program can read it! Universal code, magic!

The idea behind XXSLT is now, we actually have a program whose job it is to specify a program. So we have a XML file which specifies a second XML file, which is the program, whose job it is to transform XML to XML. As we all know, layers of abstraction are always good, and common formats such as XML are especially good, so what we have now is the ability to generate a whole family and diverse ontology of programs, all of them XML, all of them by and for XML. Imagine the compiling with your favourite XML-based compilation chain!