Re: My experiences with Rust

> On Aug 22, 2025, at 1:45 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> 
> --------
> David Chisnall writes:
> 
>>> Aka: the guy who added kern.geom.confxml in 2002
>> 
>> XML is not great for generating or parsing,
> 
> I'll have you know that XML was *THE HOT THING* in 2002 :->

Ugh it sure was.

Less than the format, I recall the same conversations emerging that sysctls were spitting out structured data, (structured how? why? by what scheme?) - making my little mind explode.

And then we started using it, and it make more sense than good ol' overloaded key/value variable names.  Thinking on this some decades later, thanks for this PHK!

> 
> Also I disagree wrt to "generating", because that's just a matter
> of sbuf_printf() calls, but parsing ?  Yeah, bugger that.

As for parsing, as a sysadmin, in my opinion no markup for structured data is perfect.

For XML (and life with kern.geom.confxml), we used this as boilerplate for many XML/SGML/HTML parsing tasks, (many little scripts probably still running today):

https://github.com/dotike/xmlparse.awk
-alt-
http://blackskyresearch.net/repos/awkparse.git

That chunk of awk is still a fun read, IMHO.

Best,
.ike


> 
> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
>