In this community's view, are there any specific XPath/XQuery/XSLT 2.0+
implementations that stand out source code wise as being (subjectively)
particularly elegant in terms of spec mapping to code? I know that Saxon
is more-or-less the (gold-standard) reference implementation circa Java
1.0 genealogy but the source code is trying (no disrespect intended).
Then there is XBase which arguably a little more modern and others like
Sedna etc in non-JVM languages which approach the implementation problem
differently.
Is it fair to say that there exists no XPath 2.0+ implementation that
can be said to be really elegant and that the "accepted as good"
products are simply heroic works of megaSLOCs in less-that-desirable
available programming languages?
I don't know, but my feeling is that the implementation of XPath 2.0+
should not have been as difficult as it seems to be and perhaps the
available language platforms just haven't helped to produce good
orthogonal, DRY stuff. You know what I mean; it shouldn't be difficult
but it is.
Cynically asking, does anyone actually care if XPath/XQuery has a really
cool behind-the-scenes source code implementation?
Justin Johansson
XPath implementation aspirant.