Home/ Questions/Q 6100775
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T13:25:28+00:00

I have found feature comparisons but not speed comparisons. Saxon is written in Java

  • 0

I have found feature comparisons but not speed comparisons.

Saxon is written in Java and I believe Zorba is written in C so one would expect Zorba to be quicker, but is it?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can run some benchmarks here: http://xqbench.org

    Since for a long time nobody answered to this post, I try to give some parts of the answer. But please consider that I am probably biased since I am working on Zorba.

    First of all I try to make some general notes:

    • Zorba is written in C++ and Saxon in Java – but the programming language is by no way an indication that one is faster than the other.
    • While Zorba is licensed under the Apache license Saxon has another licensing model. It is safe to say that the commercial Saxon version (i.e. Saxon-EE) is much faster than the open source version. Also (AFAIK) the open source version misses a lot of features from the commercial one.
    • Comparing the speed of two XQuery engines is extremely difficult. In the end it will depend very much on the use-case. It is easy for me to write down some queries that run faster in Saxon than in Zorba and vice versa.

    As long as you don’t provide any information about your use case it is probably not possible to answer your question in a helpful way. These are questions you should probably ask yourself:

    • What kind of features do you need (XQuery 1.0, Schema support, XQuery 3.0, XQuery Update facility, XQuery Scripting extension, fancy modules, Java integration, C/C++ integration etc)?
    • Does Zorba meet the requirements and which Saxon versions meet the requirements?
    • Are you willing to pay money (and Saxon is for sure a software worth some money)?
    • 0