cmark VS pulldown-cmark

I wonder if they looked into using https://github.com/asaaki/cmark.ex which is an already made Markdown Elixir NIF written in C. No glue code needed since the package already exists.

Back when I was writing Elixir, it's what I used to process Markdown and it was also substantially faster than the native Elixir Markdown library (Earmark).

As a platform that allows expressiveness, we want our users to be bold enough to ask and answer questions with either plain text or some markdowns. Compiling markdown to HTML in Rust can be done via the pulldown-cmark crate. We used it in this utility function:

I also really like this paradigm. It’s just that in old crusty null-terminated C style this is really awkward because the input data must be copied or modified. But it’s not an issue when using slices (length and pointer). Unfortunately most of the C standard library and many operating system APIs expect that.

I’ve seen this referred to as a pull parser in a Rust library? (https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark)

Really glad to see this! Really want an easy way to render graphs in Rust without resorting to the graphiz binary.

What is the current status? Not seeing it listed anywhere, like if there are features that are not supported or if it uses certain layout algorithms but others are desired.

Would you be willing to make a `[lib]` available? I see you have a `lib.rs` but it'd be great if using it didn't require pulling in `[[bin]]` dependencies (you can mark them as optional and mark `required-features` on your bin like pulldown-cmark does [0] or split it into a separate crate in a workspace). It'd also be good to find an available name for the lib and get it published (looks like someone might be squatting on `layout`).

[0] https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark/blob/master/Carg...

Author here. I actually was not aware of cmark.ex - thanks for pointing it out.

In this case the code reuse was more important than pure native speed. We already had a Rust library that used pulldown-cmark [1] with some custom tweaks that we wanted to duplicate. Maybe this behavior could have been copied using cmark.ex too (we thought about doing this in pure Elixir, as mentioned in the post), but given how straightforward Rustler made integrating our existing code, this seems like the better choice.

[1] https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark

It turned out that making the most popular Elixir Markdown processor, Earmark (originally written by Dave Thomas) and pulldown-cmark, a Rust Markdown processor, produce the same output was going to be difficult. We also required some customization that was not available in both libraries.

The crate that's closest to production quality code is pulldown-cmark, but I don't hold it up as an example of well-written code, because it's not particularly easy to understand and there's a lot of very low level code to consume the CommonMark syntax - that helps with code bloat and compile time, but not clarity.

The Markdown processor is pulldown-cmark, which supports these extensions: