Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust

Re:Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust by mdaniel on Saturday March 29, 2025 @10:05PM (#43520595)

> And it's yet another terrible DSL that you must learn when it could have been a language everybody already knows, like Python.

Oh, yeah, I 100% want to type this 15 times a day

  # I'll grant you the imports, in the spirit of fairness
  aws ec2 describe-instances | python -c '
    for r in json.load(sys.stdin)["Reservations"]:
      print("\n".join(i["PrivateIpAddress"] for i in r["Instances"]))
  '

because that is undoubtedly better than

  aws ec2 describe-instances | jq -r '.Reservations[].Instances[].PrivateIpAddress'

I mean, seriously, who can read that terrible DSL with all of its line noise

> The query part isn't even that well done, compared to XPath/JSONPath.

XPath I'll grant you, because it's actually very strong but putting JSONPath near jq in a "could be improved" debate tells me you're just not serious. JSONPath is a straight up farce

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Re:Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust by BoingBoomTschak on Sunday March 30, 2025 @05:52AM (#43522860)

1) You realize the boilerplate of reading and serializing can be abstracted, right?

2) I didn't say "replace jq with Python", but that the language part (not the functions) of jq is horrible and didn't need to be invented. Same as Avisynth vs Vapoursynth.

3) I only mentioned Python as an example, I wouldn't choose a language that needs newlines in this specific case.

For example, in my own case, this expression is `cljq '(? $ "Reservations" * "Instances" * "PrivateIpAddress")` and if I need to do more complicated stuff (map, filter, group, etc...), I use CL instead of a bespoke, ad-hoc DSL that I never remember.

> JSONPath is a straight up farce

Why? At least it's specified (though you might say that jq is too, through jaq).

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