Huge performance gains in the ZPE compiler

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.