Xmloxide
an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2
Details
- External ID
- 47201816
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Xmloxide
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 28, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 64
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8477088948787062
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects.- Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents- Anthropic attempted to make a C Compiler: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compilerI have been wondering if there are software packages that can be easily reproduced by taking the available test suites and tasking agents to work on projects until the existing test suites pass.After playing with this concept by having Claude Code reproduce redis and sqlite, I began looking for software packages where an agent-made reproduction might actually be useful.I found libxml2, a widely used, open-source C language library designed for parsing, creating, and manipulating XML and HTML documents. Three months ago it became unmaintained with the update, "This project is unmaintained and has [known security issues](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.".With a few days of work, I was able to create xmloxide, a memory safe rust replacement for libxml2 which passes the compatibility suite as well as the W3C XML Conformance Test Suite. Performance is similar on most parsing operations and better on serialization. It comes with a C API so that it can be a replacement for existing uses of libxml2.- crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/xmloxide- GitHub release: https://github.com/jonwiggins/xmloxide/releases/tag/v0.1.0While I don't expect people to cut over to this new and unproven package, I do think there is something interesting to think about here in how coding agents like Claude Code can quickly iterate given a test suite. It's possible the legacy code problem that COBOL and other systems present will go away as rewrites become easier. The problem of ongoing maintenance to fix CVEs and update to later package versions becomes a larger percentage of software package management work.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Claude integrations and coding agents
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- rust xml library replacement for libxml2
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a full, drop-in replacement for libxml2 in Rust requires reimplementing an immense surface area of complex XML specs, DTD/XSD validation, XPath, and edge-case-heavy historical C behaviors.
What it would actually take: Requires building an extensive Rust library implementing XML 1.0/1.1 specifications, SAX/DOM parsers, XML Schema (XSD), RelaxNG, and XPath 1.0 engines while maintaining ABI/API compatibility with C bindings. The difficulty lies in passing hundreds of thousands of W3C and libxml2 conformance test cases and handling decades worth of security mitigations (entity expansions, memory limits, and encoding quirks).
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: libxml2, libxslt, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, xmloxide
Concerns raised: AI-generated code without clear disclosure, Unsafe code underneath safe public interface, Lack of human code review and understanding, Algorithmic complexity security issues, Production-readiness unclear for AI-generated libraries
Feature requests: XLSX and .odt format support, XSLT support, Clear AI-generated code labeling on crates.io, Minimal unsafe code audit trail
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 391 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #76 of 392 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 117 days after the earliest competitor.
- Urlx · hn · 2026-03-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.71
- We instrumented Claude Agent SDK using a tiny Rust proxy · hn · 2025-12-04 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ChatML · hn · 2026-03-09 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- ctx · hn · 2026-07-02 · 65 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- CXCAP · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Agents, run any coding agent on your subscription not API costs · hn · 2026-05-31 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Open-agent-SDK · hn · 2026-04-02 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Running AI agents across environments needs a proper solution · hn · 2026-03-24 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.