cmark-0.3.3.1: Fast, accurate CommonMark (Markdown) parser and renderer
This package provides Haskell bindings for libcmark, the reference parser for CommonMark, a fully specified variant of Markdown. It includes sources for libcmark (0.19.0) and does not require prior installation of the C library.
cmark provides the following advantages over existing Markdown libraries for Haskell:
- Speed: Conversion speed is on par with the sundown library. We were unable to measure precisely against sundown, which raised a malloc error when compiled into our benchmark suite. Relative to other implementations: cmark was 82 times faster than cheapskate, 59 times faster than markdown, 105 times faster than pandoc, and 2.8 times faster than discount.
- Memory footprint: Memory footprint is on par with sundown. On one sample, the library uses a fourth the memory that markdown uses, and less than a tenth the memory that pandoc uses.
- Robustness: cmark can handle whatever is thrown
at it, without the exponential blowups in parsing
time one can sometimes get with other libraries.
(The input
bench/full-sample.md
, for example, causes both pandoc and markdown to grind to a halt.) - Accuracy: cmark passes the CommonMark spec's suite of over 500 conformance tests.
- Standardization: Since there is a spec and a comprehensive suite of tests, we can have a high degree of confidence that any two CommonMark implementations will behave the same. Thus, for example, one could use this library for server-side rendering and commonmark.js for client-side previewing.
- Ease of installation: cmark is portable and has minimal dependencies.
cmark does not provide Haskell versions of the whole
libcmark API, which is
built around mutable cmark_node
objects. Instead, it
provides functions for converting CommonMark to HTML
(and other formats), and a function for converting
CommonMark to a Node
tree that can be processed
further using Haskell.
A note on security: This library does not attempt to sanitize HTML output. We recommend using xss-sanitize to filter the output.
A note on stability: There is a good chance the API will change significantly after this early release.
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