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Last year we chose XML as the basis for our document language.

It's been a good choice for designing a new language, but we've been really surprised by the poor quality of the available parsers. We figured it would be a solved problem, but we'll be writing our own at some point.

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I completely agree that it is the best choice for a document language.

To the point that I have to ask: what other alternatives are there?

It's a good question. We had a previous language, JDoc, based in JSON. It covered only part of the functionality of the XML-based language and was really only for machine-machine.

We researched a bunch of others: languages like LaTeX and Typst are obvious alternatives. We also considered a super-augmented version of Markdown. Even looked at YAML.

Libxml2 segv when the input is large and the transform complicated was something of a surprise to me. Parsing xml is easy enough but I think implementing xslt is going to be a nuisance.

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