I shall let this post from my Bluesky account summarise this:
I honestly cannot believe this, but the new ZPEX 1.14.8 has brought compile time right down. I mean, right down, we're talking from ~390ms to 7ms after I made a few little changes here and there! This is one of the most revolutionary moments in ZPE's history.
— BALF (@jamiebalfour.scot) July 18, 2026 at 9:10 PM
This is a remarkable result, and one I most definitely did not expect. ZPE compiles considerably faster due to improvements to the Zenith Parsing Engine (now version 1.6). This also improves:
- The JSON parser - used frequently in the ZPE Runtime Environment (ZRE).
- The CSV parser
- The XML parser
- The TOML parser
- The INI parser
- The JBML parser
- The YAML parser (coming this year)
This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest improvements in ZPE's history, especially in the compiler. This all goes back to ZPE version 1.5.3 back in 2017, when I introduced a separate parser and compiler, which led to performance gains back then. But the next big improvement was tonight's improvement, and I still cannot believe it.
It means that there will likely be no need for any more improvements to the compiler unless they benefit the runtime.
