Perl module to parse XML into a Perl hash

 XML::Bare provides a simple API to read and write XML files, it also provides
 a function to validate the XML schema. The parser itself is a simple state
 engine that is less than 500 lines of C.
 .
 In comparison to other available Perl XML parsers that create trees, XML::Bare
 is extremely fast; benchmarking shows that it can even be one or two orders of
 magnitude faster than similar modules.