There was an unexpected compliment for Saxon on Thursday in an announcement of a new release of Per Bothner's Qexo implementation of XQuery. He slipped in the remark: "some tests are significantly faster than Saxon". More evidence that our competitors regard Saxon as the product they need to beat, and at the same time an admission that for most tests, Saxon runs faster than this particular engine. Since most developers (including me) can usually get their own product to run faster than anyone else can, that's a nice testimonial.
It's impressive though that Per is running all 16000 XQTS tests in 75 seconds. It takes me a lot longer, but I don't separate the time spent running the query from the time spent parsing and canonicalizing the actual results and reference results, and then comparing them. I must find out what Per is actually measuring. I should also follow Qexo's lead in publishing my test driver: at present it needs a bit of packaging work to make it run anywhere other than my own laptop.