26 Feb
2011
26 Feb
'11
7:09 p.m.
On Sat, 2011-02-26 at 17:33 +0100, Olivier Guilyardi wrote:
[...]
This RDF turtle format is surely a beautiful thing
when you write or read it,
but it requires such a parsing machinery...
The serd reader is about 1300 lines of C with no dependencies.
What about an alternative format intended for
lightweight packaging and parsing?
It would take the turtle metadata and convert it into a text file which could be
parsed with about 100 lines of C. It may not work for all plugins, but maybe for
the vast majority of them?
If you want a /really/ simple to parse RDF text format, it's ntriples.
The actual data itself would become significantly larger than the space
you save in the parsing code. I doubt this would be a net space savings,
unless very few plugins are involved. You could gzip it or something,
but then the plugin format is broken/wierd and you need even more
machinery...
libserd.so is 34K on my 64-bit machine (compiled with -Os), and that
includes an abbreviating serialiser. If you stripped it down to the
reader it would be significantly smaller still (let's say halved).
At least I'm thinking about that kind of solution
for packaging for Android.
Some kind of pre-parsing/metadata-simplification at packaging stage to avoid the
need for bundling a full-fledged parser.
Is that "full-fledged" parser really too big? You can't spend ~20K in a
program that's loading plugins and doing audio processing? Let's keep
things in perspective here: this parser is about as large as a simple
plugin or two, and certainly smaller than some. I don't think claiming
this is an unacceptable implementation size for using those plugins is
at all reasonable. The heavyweight parsing machinery problem is a thing
of the past.
-dr