Show HN: Xmloxide – an agent made rust replacement for libxml2

Source: Hacker News

Background

• Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch.
• Anthropic attempted to make a C compiler.

Motivation

I have been wondering whether 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 experimenting with Claude Code reproducing Redis and SQLite, I began looking for software packages where an agent‑made reproduction might actually be useful.

The Target: libxml2

libxml2 is a widely used, open‑source C library 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. It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”

Introducing xmloxide

With a few days of work I created xmloxide, a memory‑safe Rust replacement for libxml2 that:

• Passes the libxml2 compatibility suite.
• Passes the W3C XML Conformance Test Suite.
• Offers performance similar to libxml2 on most parsing operations and better performance on serialization.
• Provides a C API, allowing it to serve as a drop‑in replacement for existing libxml2 usage.

Resources

• Crates.io:
• GitHub release:

Outlook

While I don’t expect widespread adoption of this new and unproven package, the experiment highlights how coding agents like Claude Code can quickly iterate given a comprehensive test suite. If such agents can reliably rewrite legacy code, the maintenance burden associated with fixing CVEs and updating to newer package versions could become a smaller portion of overall software package management work.