I don't like Rust for this purposes. It doesn't have higher-kinded types and thus no applicatives or monads, which sort of misses the point.

I also object to the idea that parser combinators are an alternative to parser generators. They're each useful in different scenarios. But for something like XML the parser combinators will be slower.

I'd also be curious to see how the efficiency of parser combinators is affected by the absence of laziness in Rust. I seem to recall that laziness makes the analysis more complicated than you'd expect, but I need to find a source...