Better Markdown Libraries for Ruby: RDiscount and rpeg-markdown

Compared to implementations for Perl, PHP, and Python, Markdown support on Ruby has generally been inferior — very slow and somewhat buggy. Ryan Tomayko has solved this with two new Ruby extensions that wrap extremely fast (and accurate) C libraries for Markdown: David Loren Parsons’s Discount and Jon MacFarleane’s peg-markdown. I prefer the RDiscount extension — it’s faster, easier to install on Mac OS X, and has a liberal BSD-style license — but they’re both good, and far better than the old BlueCloth Ruby extension.

★ Sunday, 17 August 2008