nimler VS cmark

It's one reason I prefer lighter languages for NIF's. My personal preference is to use Nim and Nimler [1]. It generally compiles quicker than Rust while providing most of the same benefits. To be fair compiling a small Rust library doesn't take too much time. Especially compared to the performance numbers from those Rust NIFs!

1: https://github.com/wltsmrz/nimler

I use GNU make. Write content in markdown, feed it to https://github.com/commonmark/cmark to create html. I intended to splice files together using xslt but echo and cat written in the makefile sufficed.

I'm not totally sure I'd recommend that but I do like the markdown => html flow.

I seem to be in the middle of trying to build something similar to this. I want it to run on an android phone but otherwise the same sort of idea, offline-first information I want access to.

There's some weirdness around android browsers refusing to load html from the phone itself on security grounds. The OP uses a "progressive web app" which seems to be the proper way to do this at some point in the past, but firefox has killed that for some reason. Thus the most difficult part of the project seems to be persuading my phone to render html without copying the files to some server (or running a fileserver on the phone itself, to look at from the phone, which seems absurd).

What I can offer for people stumbling down the same path:

- Obsidian works fine as for ad hoc authoring of markdown while walking around

- It is known on stack overflow that markdown can't be sanely parsed into an AST

- That knowledge is kind of a branding misfire, the 'markdown' one is looking for is here https://github.com/commonmark/cmark

- That cmark binary + some foreach-file style script will turn markdown into html or xml. If you choose makefile and put spaces in the name of files you'll have a moderately bad few minutes cursing your tools

- Given that output xml/html, you can build whatever other html you see fit

- That html can be written back to the obsidian vault and opened by a phone browser (at least if it's a single file)

- CSS thus far appears to be required, I was really hoping to annotate the html instead

First 90% done here, second 90% to go.

Yeah no doubt it, although in this case the C implementation has been a long running project that's under the official commonmark GitHub repo at https://github.com/commonmark/cmark.

But I think the most important thing here is an Elixir NIF already exists to use it. The blog post as is leaves readers having to implement ~100 lines of Elixir code to use the Rust version because the authors of blog post didn't include that in the article, or open source it as a library for others to use.

So from a reader's POV, if your goal is to get a highly stable, fast and safe Markdown parser running in Elixir, the Elixir cmark library I linked in a parent comment solves that problem out of the box.

I'm confused about how to use a c library (specifically, cmark) from zig.

Writing Documents Markdown (and md2pdf or cmark + html2ps + ps2pdf) / plain text / groff

It's built on top of cmark which make it fast, and use pure markdown without any proprietary format. It currently supports both macOS and iOS.

However, writing a proper markdown parser is quite difficult as you have to support nesting and many weird corner cases. So, if you do not need to write your own parser (e.g. for learning purposes), it would be a lot easier to use an existing parser and write a custom renderer for roff. Some such parsers are cmark, commonmark.js, and goldmark.

I just use the small reference C implementation of CommonMark and it works great:

https://github.com/commonmark/cmark

There is an example where you load it via shared library in Python, i.e. send a Markdown string and get back an HTML string.