Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - Tue, 13 Feb 2007

Okay. I’ve done enough data structure restructuring for now. My main goal was to separate citations and I’ve done that. The rest can improve bit by bit as it needs to.

I used to implement citations as a set of linked records that had a lot of repeated information in them. I thought I’d get a performance boost by switching them to a string-based structure. The new structure is definitely easier for me to program with and was worth the effort. But the execution time stayed the same and memory increased 5%. That surprised me very much, since I was sure memory use would have been reduced. I spent all day yesterday trying to figure out why, but couldn’t.

Even so, my other improvements have given a 15% speed improvement and reduced memory use by 12% since the last release. That’s good enough for now and I’ll get back to adding the rest of the features needed to get version 0.98.9 out.