[RhodesianHunter]

>Some of the serialized data was stored as XML (over 1M lines!), which was slow to parse and load. Rich modified the program to serialize the data as Ruby code, which loaded much faster

So he took a data format designed for human readability and converted it to a data format that's designed purely to be read by Ruby and people are surprised that it's faster?

[foldor]

I would argue that an XML file that's "over 1M lines!" is no longer human readable.

[RhodesianHunter]

That's not the point though.

[skitter]

I think a bigger difference is that the XML is parsed by a Ruby program and the generated Ruby code is parsed by a C program.

[RhodesianHunter]

Using something like protobuf would have required fewer steps and adhered to a standardized format.

[ckolkey]

It sounds like the novel idea was thinking to do that in the first place

[RhodesianHunter]

"Use a more performant serialization format" is hardly novel. It's why things like protobuf exist.

[giraffe_lady]

lol what do you want here. "ok you're right, the approach that worked is bad we should have waited for the astute technical insight of an anonymous internet commenter two decades later." you got it bud A++ are you looking for work you seem delightful.

[RhodesianHunter]

I'm not sure why you're so upset over this. All I've done is point out that some people put a ton of work into a great deal of engineering effort to solve a problem that would have been trivially solved by merely using a different choice of serialization format. Even 10 years ago the technology to do so was widely available and standardized.

But I mean sure, WOOHOO, what a great achievement!