Xqerl – Erlang Xquery 3.1 Processor

Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago

smartmic

52 points

12 comments

zadean.github.ioTechstory

calmmixed

Debate

30/100

XqueryXML DatabasesErlangData Processing

Key topics

Xquery

XML Databases

Erlang

Data Processing

The post introduces Xqerl, an Erlang XQuery 3.1 processor, sparking discussion about its use cases and the relevance of XQuery in modern tech stacks.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Moderate engagement

First comment

Peak period

84-90h

Avg / period

3.7

Comment distribution11 data points

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Based on 11 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Nov 11, 2025 at 4:48 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Nov 14, 2025 at 5:14 PM EST
4d after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
7 comments in 84-90h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Nov 15, 2025 at 9:33 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04

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Discussion (12 comments)

Showing 11 comments of 12

cyberpunk

about 2 months ago

1 reply

This looks cool, Im quite uninformed about xml databases and xquery though, and I had foolishly assumed I had quite a broad exposure to tech stacks.

Whats this stuff used for?

smartmicAuthor

about 2 months ago

I use XQuery to transform XML data. Whatever can be done with XSLT can also be done in XQuery. It is a functional language and, unlike XSLT, it is supported by more tools for newer versions (XSLT > 1.0 is only supported by Saxon, as far as I know). Overall, it feels much more modern and ergonomic for querying and transforming XML. Best of all: XQuery 3.1 supports JSON natively — I have also adopted it for JSON in some ETL pipelines.

Check Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery

victorbjorklund

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Cool. Elixir dev here but less familiar with XML (other than html). When would this be useful? Like any common usecases?

dledesma

about 2 months ago

1 reply

I used XQuery at an old job where we received XML payloads from a third-party service and would use it to massage payloads that were malformed or that our system had a bug when processing them so that we could store the XQuery transformation in the database for auditing and reproducibility. It was a pretty unenjoyable experience and I would've preferred to manually edit the payloads directly but that's legacy systems for you.

Hopefully someone else can chime in and sell it better than me. 8^)

victorbjorklund

about 2 months ago

make sense! I might have similar thing on a pending project.

oever

about 2 months ago

1 reply

This is stale. BaseX is an active equivalent.

https://basex.org/

nesarkvechnep

about 2 months ago

Yeah, in Java…

abrookewood

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Hasn't been touched in 3 years: https://github.com/zadean/xqerl

arthurcolle

about 2 months ago

Maybe it is complete

jact

about 2 months ago

1 reply

Xquery is what I would call a “weirdly good” language. It’s weird how good it is and how well designed it is relative to how little adoption it has.

The key thing is that since XML is a first-class datatype in XPath, trees are therefore a first class datatype. Since XPath is built into the language, you don’t need lenses or anything like that to do operations on deep tree structures. It just works. I am tempted sometimes to use it for more general projects than processing XML.

oever

about 2 months ago

At work, our entire website is generated with XQuery.

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