`quick_xml` was chosen due to it's high performance and support for zero-copy use cases. However, we are not using `minidom`, which is the already-extant DOM impl that uses `quick_xml` as it's parsing provider. This is because `minidom` nodes are not amenable to garbage collection.
Specifically: we want to be able to construct a new `Object` variant that holds part of an XML node. However, `minidom::Element` directly owns it's children, meaning that we can't hold references to it from within `Object` while also keeping those objects to the `'gc` lifetime. Hence, we provide a GC-exclusive DOM implementation.
I ruled out solutions such as holding an entire XML tree in an `Rc` and having AVM objects that shadow them. This works for `SwfSlice` because indexing an array is cheap; but traversing a tree can get very expensive. XML is used in many places in Flash Player, so it's important that we treat it like a first-class citizen.
David Wendt