Replacing std.xml

[Sean Kelly]

On Aug 29, 2013, at 11:57 AM, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> One way is to write the core code of std.xml in such a way that it
> handles all data as ubyte[] (or ushort[]/uint[] for 16-bit/32-bit
> encodings) so that it's encoding-independent. Then on top of this core,
> write some convenience wrappers that casts/converts to string, wstring,
> dstring. As an initial stab, we could support only UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32
> if the user asks for string/wstring/dstring, and leave XML in other
> encodings up to the user to decode manually. This way, at least the user
> can get the data out of the file.
> 
> Later on, once we've gotten our act together with std.encoding, we can
> hook it up to std.xml to provide autoconversion.

As long autoconversion is optional.  When parsing XML or JSON or whatever, I generally only care about specific strings, and sometimes don't want anything decoded at all.  Having decoding done automatically before the event fires is a huge and potentially unnecessary performance hit.  Not doing this decoding automatically is what makes the Tango XML parser so fast.