bear-markdown: A very "bare" markdown parser.
A markdown parser based on simple-markdown.
I wanted to learn how markdown parsers work and learn more about simple-markdown. Markdown is full of features that I don't use, so I wondered how compact I could make a parser that suppported only what I needed.
Spoiler: markdown is hard to get right so I didn't.
Like simple-markdown, this parser
- is easily extensible (i.e. it is easy to add rules to parse custom things like math)
- is modular (i.e. it is easy to add/modify/remove rules)
- is reasonably fast
- is fairly well documented code
- has some tests
- parses raw markdown into a simple AST (abstract syntax tree) which can be turned into html, react, vue, hyperapp, etc.
- is small (2.9kb minified + gzip)
- no dependencies
Unlike simple-markdown, this parser
- does not handle many edge cases
- does not confrom to commonmark or any other standard
- has a slightly different (possibly a little more consistent) AST format
- is written in typescript
I found several other markdown parsers and, with the least amount of effort, tried use them to parse a string of markdown into a string of html. The benchmark can be found here.
| Parser | speed in op/s (higher is better) |
|---|---|
| this repo | 2454 |
| simple-markdown | 2045 |
| marked | 2963 |
| markdown | 1912* |
| showdown | 814* |
| micromarkdown | 8525* |
| commonmarkjs | 5665* |
*I had to edit the benchmark for these because they use a slightly different dialect of markdown. The test isn't exactly apples-to-apples, but it's close.
| Parser | bundle size in kb (lower is better) | minified | gziped |
|---|---|---|---|
| this repo | 35 | 11 | 2.9 |
| simple-markdown | 54 | 13 | 4.3 |
| marked | 38 | 19 | 6.1 |
| markdown | 82 | 25 | 8.9 |
| showdown | 181 | 98 | 33 |
| micromarkdown | 22 | 11 | 4.7 |
| commonmarkjs | 203 | 86 | 34 |
This table was made by manually editing lib/index.js so that it only requires one of the following libraries (e.g. require("simple-markdown")) and running
yarn run bundle && ls -lah dist/ | grep bundle
to measure the size of including each library.