A while back I saw glow and I won­dered ... how hard could it be to write that?

I mean, it looks im­pres­sive! It ren­ders mark­down to a ter­mi­nal!

Well, it's not all that hard if you have a nice mark­down pars­er you can hack, so I spent a cou­ple of hours and wrote it.

It's called mark­term and it ... well, it's done?

You can use it as a li­brary from Crys­tal, or you can use the mark­term bi­na­ry.

It can syn­tax high­light code (as long as you have chro­ma in­stalled), it does the right thing when piped to an­oth­er pro­gram, and it tries to look good but not gaudy.

What will I use it for?

Show­ing CLI pro­gram's help. I am us­ing do­copt late­ly and the for­mat of the do­copt in­put is al­most mark­down. With a bit of flair it can be both, and us­ing mark­term I can show it in a ter­mi­nal in a much nicer way than usu­al.

Ex­tra: why am I start­ing so many projects late­ly?

• Be­cause it makes me hap­py
• Be­cause in most cas­es it's not code that will need main­te­nance. I ex­pect mark­term to just work for the next 10 years with­out me touch­ing it, if need­ed.
• Be­cause I can

I am work­ing a bit (s­low­ly) on Nicol­i­no a stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor writ­ten in Crys­tal. One of the things it does is, it ren­ders mark­down files.

Since the mark­down us­age is lim­it­ed to, like, 3 lines, I thought "Why not try all the mark­down li­braries and see which one is faster?"

So, I did.

The bench­mark is sim­ple:

• An emp­ty Nicol­i­no site.
• 4000 sim­ple mark­down files (a few lorem ip­sum para­graph­s)
• Nicol­i­no com­piled in re­lease mode
• Ren­der the whole site 10 times, av­er­age the last 7 runs
• De­fault con­figs for ev­ery­thing

All this on this ma­chine:

        a8888b.           Host        -  ralsina@mindy
       d888888b.          Machine     -  Micro Computer (HK) Tech Limited Default string UM560 XT
       8P"YP"Y88          Kernel      -  6.9.9-arch1-1
       8|o||o|88          Distro      -  EndeavourOS
       8'    .88          DE          -  Qtile
       8`._.' Y8.         Packages    -  1340 (pacman), 1 (cargo), 18446744073709551615 (Homebrew)
      d/      `8b.        Terminal    -  zellij
     dP        Y8b.       Shell       -  fish
    d8:       ::88b.      Uptime      -  10d 18h 7m
   d8"         'Y88b      CPU         -  AMD Ryzen 5 5600H with Radeon Graphics (12)
  :8P           :888      Resolution  -  4096x2160, 1920x1080
   8a.         _a88P      CPU Load    -  15%
 ._/"Yaa     .| 88P|      Memory      -  9.2 GB/24.5 GB
 \    YP"    `|     `.
 /     \.___.d|    .'
 `--..__)     `._.'

Of course Nicol­i­no does some oth­er things be­sides ren­der­ing mark­down, so to iso­late that part I ran a cou­ple of dum­my im­ple­men­ta­tion­s:

• NOOP It does noth­ing. When asked to com­pile a string to mark­down, it re­turns the same string.
• TOEMP­TY It does less than noth­ing. When asked to com­pile a string to mark­down, it re­turns an emp­ty string.

So, the dif­fer­ence be­tween emp­ty and noop is prob­a­bly what it takes to ren­der some tem­plates and store the out­put in disk.

Then I ran the bench­mark for the 5 mark­down li­braries I could find:

• markd
• cr-dis­count
• crys­tal-c­mark
• cr-­mark-gfm
• luce

Here is a chart show­ing the times in sec­onds for each li­brary with­out the time that is used in oth­er things (NOOP's time, which was 2.62 sec­ond­s).

So, luce is much, much, much slow­er, and crys­tal-c­mark is the fastest. And cr-dis­count (MY OWN BIND­ING) is much slow­er than the oth­er­s, which is a bit dis­ap­point­ing.

On the oth­er hand, there are two sides to op­ti­miz­ing. One is choos­ing the fastest li­brary, the oth­er is not car­ing if the dif­fer­ence is small in ab­so­lute, even if it's large in rel­a­tive.

What does that mean?

This is over 4000 doc­u­ments.

So, while cr-dis­count is slow­er, it's still ren­der­ing 4000 doc­u­ments in 0.66 sec­ond­s. That's 0.000165 sec­onds per doc­u­men­t.

That's 1.65 tenths of a thou­sand of a sec­ond. That's over 6000 doc­u­ments per sec­ond.

If the nor­mal use­case was to ren­der thou­sands of doc­u­ments, then that would make a dif­fer­ence. But it's not. It's usu­al­ly 3 doc­u­ments.

So, as long as cr-dis­count has any fea­ture I need and it's not in the oth­er li­braries, it's fine to use it, and the same goes for the oth­ers (ex­cept luce, I guess, but stil­l: 757 doc­u­ments per sec­ond is not bad).

Update: Compiling discount with -O3 brings it down to 0.48, which is bettern than 0.66 but makes no difference for the conclusions.

Since ev­ery­one is in lock­down and I am no ex­cep­tion, I have spent some of my time do­ing things in open source project­s. Let me in­tro­duce you two new plug­ins for Niko­la my favourite stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor.

1. marko

   Yet an­oth­er im­­ple­­men­­ta­­tion of Mark­­down! And since adding sup­­port for new im­­ple­­men­­ta­­tions of mark­­down is easy, I added it.

   Marko has some in­­ter­est­ing ideas. If a ecosys­tem of ex­ten­­sions de­vel­op­s, it will be easy to sup­­port them on the Niko­la side.

2. myst

   Yes, an­oth­er mark­­down but, again, one with orig­i­­nal ideas. In this case, myst has a lot of re­Struc­­tured Text flavour, with sup­­port for di­rec­­tives and roles.

Of course when us­ing marko or myst in Niko­la you al­so get sup­port for short­codes so they are ex­tra-ex­ten­si­ble here.

If you are look­ing for a stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor, I am fair­ly sure "it does­n't sup­port my favourite markup lan­guage" is not a rea­son not to choose Niko­la :-)