What's coming in glibc 2.10: XML

I think it's weirder that glibc will be outputting a big string than that the string will be XML. What I think would be more sensible is if it output a data structure that looked like something you might get by parsing XML (ignoring comments, irrelevant whitespace, details of how characters were written, etc). That is, it would be a struct with a name, an array of attribute keys and values, an array of children, and a string for character data.

This would have the same extensibility benefits as XML, but avoid most of the parsing overhead. (Of course, the main practical extensibility benefit comes from using ASCII decimal strings of arbitrary length for numbers, which then requires a bit of parsing.)