Thirteen Years of json2xml

On July 6, 2013, I published json2xml 0.1 on PyPI. Its job was straightforward: take JSON and turn it into XML. Thirteen years later, that is still its job. The interesting part is what has accumulated around it: compatibility decisions, regression tests, profiling sessions, a native Rust extension, millions of downloads, and code that appears in public projects maintained by Google Cloud, AWS, and NASA. A small library can travel a long way through an import statement. With version 8.0.0 released on October 12, this feels like a useful moment to look at the whole project: where it began, how the engineering changed, and what the public evidence says about who uses it. Millions of downloads, one small job A historical Pepy snapshot records 7,493,413 cumulative PyPI downloads. That snapshot predates this article, so it establishes that the project had already passed 7.49 million downloads; it is not an exact lifetime count as of October 14, 2026. For a fresh view of activity, the PyPI…