It hard to take a hardline stance on something with so much give and take.
XML is great because there are plenty of fast parsers for it with bindings in pretty every programming. It can be modified with nothing more than a text editor, by someone halfway competent.
XML is bad because it will never be quite as optimal as some binary only solution and editing with a test editor is painful.
Its not like most programming languages would have a hard time with gzipped xml either. This grants most of the benefits of binary formats and is often smaller than all but the most carefully designed ones.
All of that even presumes config load time matters. I a crazy large case maybe 10MB loads from a disk and the important stuff is cached in memory, in the actual structures that will use the data later. It just doesn't matter. Gzipped xml is fast enough for realtime high performance games, who cares about this silly XML hating anymore. Just pick something that works and move on.
XML is great because there are plenty of fast parsers for it with bindings in pretty every programming. It can be modified with nothing more than a text editor, by someone halfway competent.
XML is bad because it will never be quite as optimal as some binary only solution and editing with a test editor is painful.
Its not like most programming languages would have a hard time with gzipped xml either. This grants most of the benefits of binary formats and is often smaller than all but the most carefully designed ones.
All of that even presumes config load time matters. I a crazy large case maybe 10MB loads from a disk and the important stuff is cached in memory, in the actual structures that will use the data later. It just doesn't matter. Gzipped xml is fast enough for realtime high performance games, who cares about this silly XML hating anymore. Just pick something that works and move on.