pulldown-cmark VS cmark

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:

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.