[plywoodtrees]

Sure, XML-RPC not the best protocol. Compared to others it's pretty simple, and the mess and number of edge cases is smaller than SSL or TCP/IP.

If C isn't up to implementing an only slightly complicated network protocol, it's not much of a systems programming language, is it?

It turns out, C is fine for writing such systems and getting them working fairly well, but very poor at making them really reliable and secure, and that's no longer a good tradeoff.