Xmloxide

Jon Wiggins looked at libxml2—the decades-old C library that parses XML and HTML in everything from Python to PHP to curl—and watched it quietly die. Three months ago it went unmaintained with a note calling it "foolish" to use for untrusted data due to known security issues. That's a big deal when libxml2 sits at the core of almost every programming language and toolchain on the planet.

So Jon tried something different. Instead of manually rewriting it, he fed the test suite to an AI coding agent and said "make this pass." Three days later, Xmloxide was born—a pure Rust replacement that passes the libxml2 test suite. Memory safe, modern, and ready for production. This is the culmination of what Cursor and Anthropic have been experimenting with: using AI agents to reproduce complex, real-world software by just pointing them at test suites and letting them iterate.

The implications are wild. Every abandoned C library out there—and there are thousands—could get a Rust-powered second life without a single human writing the code. Jon just proved it's not a demo. It's a pattern. Xmloxide is currently available on GitHub and looking for contributors and early adopters who need XML parsing in memory-safe environments.