Krakdown

Krakdown is a markdown parser written in native Kotlin (no external dependencies). It is meant to be used either on the server side (running in a JVM), or to be cross-compiled into Javascript and run in a browser.

Project status

The project has a small portion of the common-mark specification covered (mostly around lists and blockquotes).

It is not heavily tested yet, and probably contains a large amount of bugs, and potential performance issues.

Structure

The parser is broken into two parts: a block parser and an inline parser. Both parsers work via chain of responsibility where rules are evaluated in order on the input.

The inline parser consists of a lexer and a parser. The lexer is fairly heavy, as it evaluates tokens based on current context (it performs look-behind).

Roadmap

Commonmark compatibility

Next steps here would involve adding the remaining common mark tests to the src/test/resources/commonmark.testspec specification file and then performing the necessary fixes in the parsers to get this project to 100% commonmark compatibility.

Streaming parsing

Once common mark compatibility is reached, the parser will be updated to support stream parsing, i.e. consume data from an input stream and produce a stream of parse nodes. This would, ideally, decrease the memory footprint of the parser, as it would ideally keep at most the necessary memory for processing a single block of text.

Performance

At present, the performance of the parser is not thoroughly measured. A test suite should be built to measure the performance of the parser.

Support for non-standard markdown extensions

Support for tables, todos, footnotes, definition lists, custom block quotes, table of contents, etc.