easy fast ruby libxml interface

I’ve been a working on a little project for a while now, an hpricot-styled ruby libxml library. I started the project in order to learn the ruby c extension api and create an easy to use xml library for ruby. Hpricot is great but it is not a full fledged xml library and isn’t intended as such. Libxml has ruby bindings, but they provide the same libxml api which is very un-ruby (imho). Rexml is just plain old slow. So my current hacking has left me with a library capable of loading xml strings/arrays whatever into an object (from what I’ve seen libxml-ruby doesn’t support loading from memory/strings). I can run xpath searches and do xslt. I’m working on cleaning up the api to make it match hpricot and then I’ll probably release the parse/read-only version as v0.1 in the next few weeks.

Here’s a snippet of benchmark output comparing the different libraries in use (run on a late 2k6 Macbook w/ 2gb of ram):

(in /Users/segfault/Devel/fastxml)
ruby ./benchmarks/speedtest.rb
                     user     system      total        real
fastxml.new      0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001102)
fastxml.to_s     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000629)
fastxml.search   0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000207)


hpricot.new      0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.012319)
hpricot.to_s     0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.003164)
hpricot.search   0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.000603)

libxml.new       0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001287)
libxml.to_s      0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000698)
libxml.search    0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000073)

REXML.new        0.020000   0.000000   0.020000 (  0.024030)
REXML.to_s       0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.011971)
REXML.xpath      0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001092)

xpath expression: /feed/entry
fastxml nodes: 15
 libxml nodes: 0
hpricot nodes: 15
  REXML nodes: 15