Jean-Yves,
Most of the existing XML tools are too CPU- and memory-intensive, I
agree, but NetBSD happens to be the center for improvements. Producing
a lightweight alternative for XML processing was the concern of a NetBSD
GSoC 2009 project that I mentored. Xmlgrep, for search/extraction
on XML streams, is very usable, and a program called xmlsed, for
transforming XML streams, is under development. By design, xmlgrep
is FAST and it uses memory conservatively. Furthermore, the xmlgrep
binary and its light dependencies are quite a bit smaller than you might
expect:
% ls -l `which xmlgrep`
-rwxr-x--- 1 dyoung wasabi 47K Nov 16 17:57
/home/dyoung/scratch-cuw/xmltools/xmlgrep/xmlgrep
% ldd `which xmlgrep`
/home/dyoung/scratch-cuw/xmltools/xmlgrep/xmlgrep:
-lexpat.1 => /usr/pkg/lib/libexpat.so.1
-lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12
% ls -l /usr/pkg/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 155K Jun 18 2008 /usr/pkg/lib/libexpat.so.1.5.2