PHP Markdown, speed, MovableType

[Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov]

Personally when I was still busy with PHP (now my focus of attention is 
in different, primarily study-related areas) I was setting a global 
constant and depending on it, either a PerlMarkdown or a PHPMarkdown 
formatter was instantiated. Obviously I finally setteld with Perl 
version for speed :-) however, this is all completely simple (just a 
bit of OO crud around two function calls) and I am not sure it can be 
useable in plugin context.

I wouldn't mind to try to develop something like this, but I just don't 
have the time to do it. Maybe this can be actually incorporated into 
PHP Markdown itself? (I mean, this sounds a bit absurd, but not less 
absurd and effective than a program like SketchUp using it's own C++ 
logic instead of Cocoa on OS X because it is faster).

I mean, I love Markdown, and I love it being available on my scripting 
platform of choice, but in many web environments the speed hit is 
immense.

So why not try to implement a Perl hook in your own package? Figuring 
out paths can be quite a bit of pain but still...

P.S. It might be indeed interesting to see how Markdown performs in 
different systems (assuming that the implementations are almost 
identical).

On 2-dec-04, at 23:52, Michel Fortin wrote:
>
> You are right about this. Perl is a lot faster, at least when dealing 
> with regular expressions, and it shows when using Markdown vs. PHP 
> Markdown. It would be interesting to see a benchmarking tool included 
> with the testing suite John is working on so we can get a better 
> picture.
>
> I still hope the optimization included in 1.0.1b2 will improve things 
> for many people. I think people who write many long paragraphs without 
> manual line breaks will see the difference. But it's still way slower 
> than Perl.
>
> **Idea:** Maybe someone could make a Markdown.pl wrapper for PHP that 
> includes plugins interfaces present in PHP Markdown. This way, 
> Markdown.pl could be used anywhere PHP Markdown can just by replacing 
> the markdown.php file by the wrapper. This could improve performance 
> for those who have access to Perl on their server.
>
> The wrapper may also be a good solution for MovableType users in need 
> of Markdown filtering in their dynamic pages, since MovableType 
> already requires Perl.
>
>
--
Julian "Julik" Tarkhanov