Can you elaborate on that? I know it's really in fashion to hate on XML here, I just want to understand what people's complaints are.
Having written parsers for JSON, YAML, and XML at various points, I can tell you that XML was not much more complicated than JSON. It's got a good, clean spec and not too many rules.
The first article may be interesting or it may not be, it's four thousand words long and I don't know what I'm looking for. It sounds like there are some bugs in XML parsers. Well, people put bugs in simple code all the time. People also try to be clever and make parsers Very Fast, and people are also lazy and don't test simple edge cases. Mix these together and you get bugs.
Then, some third-party plist parsing library written in C can segfault. I'm not surprised! Does that mean XML parsing is hard? No. It happened because it's easy to make a library written in C segfault, no matter how easy the problem you're solving is. C is like that.
I can say that I have actually authored a different plist parsing library in C, and I don't remember running into a bunch of segfaults. What I do remember is that of the major plist variants, the XML variant was the easiest to work with. The text variant is more concise but you can't use an off-the-shelf XML parser. The binary format is poorly documented. Clear win for XML plists, in my book.
I'm not going to take Apple's hit-or-miss software quality or bugs in some random third-party library as an indictment of XML.
I am, actually: writing a parser that is bug-for-bug compatible with Apple is nontrivial, and you haven't given me anything so far that convinces me that you realize that complexity and have dealt with it in the way I am describing.
I asked because a conversation about whether I “realize that complexity” is exactly the kind of conversation I want to avoid. I’m not here to litigate how good a developer I am.
The sense I’m getting—to be honest—is that you want to ask me questions until I “submit”. Maybe I’m off the mark! There are a lot of interesting directions that a conversation about parser correctness can go. You can discuss different goals, the idea of parsing to a spec versus matching the behavior of a reference implementation, fuzzing, attacks, stack overflow, and ergonomics like the quality of error messages. It’s an interesting subject.
Note that this has nothing to do with how good a developer you are. I am specifically talking about your accuracy with parsing property lists as Apple does. You could have a perfect, XML spec compliant, stable parser and it would still not be relevant here because Apple does not use one themselves and third-party implementations which aim to be compatible must be bug-for-bug compatible.
