Saxon

Legacy ID: #4708164 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

It's a reasonable suggestion, and is in fact not difficult (Saxon currently goes to some trouble to make sure that unreferenced functions are compiled, solely to support the fact that they can be called directly from Java). The obvious answer is a compile time flag to indicate that functions should be callable from Java, set to false by default - I think we can take the compatibility hit for the relatively few people using this feature. Separate compilation of modules would of course be another useful step forwards, but is rather harder to achieve, especially the issue of comparing schema consistency.

Legacy ID: #4708170 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

I should point out of course that Saxon is obliged to report all static errors in functions even if they are never called, so it won't be possible to eliminate all the compile-time work. It would be interesting to have some measurement as to how much the start-up time is reduced if you remove the unused functions from the compilation - that gives an upper bound on the saving that might be possible.

Legacy ID: #4708248 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

I've taken a look at it and unfortunately it's not so easy at all. Some of the checks that the specification requires (for example the checks requiring consistency between the schema imported into a calling module and the schema imported into a called module) are done at quite a late stage of the compilation process, and it would be non-conformant to omit these checks even for a function that is never called. Other phases of compiling a function body are done before it is known whether there are any calls to a function or not. So it doesn't look as if there are any easy savings here.