GitHub user jonwiggins released xmloxide, a pure Rust reimplementation of the unmaintained libxml2 library. Libxml2, the standard XML/HTML parser, became unmaintained in December 2025 due to known security flaws, warning against its use for untrusted data. xmloxide offers a memory-safe, arena-based tree implementation passing all 1727 W3C XML Conformance Test Suite tests. Performance benchmarks show 1.5-2.4x faster serialization and competitive parsing speeds, though SVG parsing is 12% slower.

It maintains a full C API for seamless integration with existing C/C++ projects. While not a direct replacement, xmloxide demonstrates how coding agents can rapidly iterate on legacy codebases when test suites exist, potentially easing future rewrites of systems like COBOL. The project highlights a shift where maintenance burdens for CVE fixes and version updates become a larger software management percentage.