we've all learned about things, not understood them, and thought "wow, these people must be idiots. why would they have made this complicated thing? makes no sense whatsoever. I can't believe these people, idiots, never thought this through like I have."
Most of us, fortunately, don't post these thoughts to the internet for anybody to read.
Very cool! I recently wrote an XSLT 2 transpiler for js (https://github.com/egh/xjslt) - it's nice to see some options out there! Writing the xpath engine is probably the hard part (I relied on fontoxpath). I'm going to be looking into what you have done for inspiration!
I developed xjslt, an XSLT 2.0 (https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/) compiler for JavaScript. XSLT is still the best way to transform XML content into other XML or HTML content, and there is only one generally available 2.0 or later version, Saxon. Saxon is an excellent piece of software, but SaxonJS is not open source and I thought it might be good to have another option.
There is a simple command line interface as well as the ability to compile to a standalone JavaScript file for loading in a browser and to a JavaScript file that can be used in NodeJS and other JavaScript runtimes. This means you can run your XSLT transforms on the server or in a cloud function.
The majority of functionality is in place and it has worked with many XSLT files I have tried. There are a number of incomplete and/or broken features. The speed is very reasonable.
The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.
Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes the great skill that agriculture workers bring to the job that they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.
Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that every human possesses and that they bring to their work.
Most of us, fortunately, don't post these thoughts to the internet for anybody to read.