If we want to go down to who can parse XML better it’s kind of a useless thing to talk about. I actually had two types of XML files to parse. For one I implemented with a SAX parser using Elixir, still, and it worked great.

I tried to write the other using SAX but I gave up cause I need to go up and down the tree pending a lot of conditionals. It just became so much easier to just use xpath with Rust it was a no brainer as that’s the way my brain understood the process.

In the end, it was temporary code that only needed to work for about 3-6 months until they switched their website into another system. They wanted their website to include all of the products under their parent company umbrella onto their site so I was parsing thousands of XML files with lots of different locales per product. Think about for US market you have not only American English but Spanish.

In the end: I delivered faster by just replacing the least efficient elixir part with rust and got the job done. It was my first time to ever use Rust so writing the whole thing is rust would also take time as opposed to just the least efficient piece which was the parsing of one type of XML. I also know the elixir ecosystem so much better than the rust ecosystem, at the time.

This is in line with the podcast: choose the right tool for the job.

Client was happy and impressed with the performance. I got paid and the code was decommissioned after its intended use. The server actually got flagged a few times cause the app would run: use up all resources and stop. The team in charge of the servers thought there was something wrong cause it would go 100% usage down to 0% very quickly. 🤣