XSLT and XPATH: A Guide to XML Transformations

C.3. Final notes

The above stylesheet was tested using James Clark's XT XSLT processor. I also wrote a C++ implementation. Running both on my computer yielded the results in Table C-1.

Table C-1. Comparing processing speed between between XSLT and C++ for solving N-Queens

Number of Queens	Number of Solutions	Time to run in XSLT	Time to run in C++
4	2	1.0 second	0.065 seconds
6	4	1.5 second	0.065 seconds
8	92	8.5 seconds	0.065 seconds
10	724	3.0 minutes	0.180 seconds

XT is a pretty fast XSLT processor. It is just not optimized for the kind of processing this stylesheet performs. Not only that, while the stylesheet does print all the solutions to the N-Queens problem, it does not print a serial number by each. It turns out that doing so is a non-trivial ...