[gclist] Garbage collection and XML

[Bill Foote]

"Richard A. O'Keefe" wrote:
> 
>         Really interesting results.  What you have shown here, though,
>         does not seem to be that DOM API is terribly bad for memory savings.
>         Rather, it seems to show that DOM implementations should use shared
>         strings/attributes.
> 
> If you follow the letter of the DOM specification (the CORBA IDL, not the
> Java and Javascript bindings) that is not *allowed*.
> 
> I think you may have overlooked one point I made, which is that the
> DOM flatly and unconditionally *requires* that strings be sequences of
> 16-bit characters.  That's a factor of two overhead in space, even if
> a DOM implementation *were* to use shared strings.


How on Earth did they manage to word a normative requirement that does
that?

Surely, if I store strings UTF-8 encoded in an immutable string type, there's
no way for an application to tell I'm sharing strings behind the scenes.  I
have trouble imagining wording that could place a testable normative requirement
like this on an API.  I'm genuinely curious; what wording in the DOM spec says
this?

Confused,

Bill
-- 
Bill Foote                                         bill.foote @ sun.com
Java TV Standards Engineer          http://java.sun.com/products/javatv