peg-markdown (C) and rpeg-markdown (ruby gem)

[John MacFarlane]

Markdowners:

I've released version 0.4.1 of peg-markdown, a C implementation of
markdown. peg-markdown uses Ian Piumarta's peg/leg parser generator to
generate a parser from a parsing expression grammar (PEG). You can
inspect the grammar for markdown at

    http://github.com/jgm/peg-markdown/tree/HEAD/markdown_parser.leg

peg-markdown now provides both a C library and a standalone 'markdown'
program. The memory leaks in previous versions have been plugged, and
parsing accuracy has been improved considerably. 

peg-markdown is very fast (on my machine, it parses a 178K benchmark
file in 0.175 seconds; that's over 30 times faster than Markdown.pl
v1.0.1). Optional syntax extensions are provided for footnotes and smart
typography (these can be enabled using command-line switches). In
addition to HTML, peg-markdown can convert markdown to LaTeX or
groff-mm. Adding writers for other formats would be an easy task.

You can download a tarball of version 0.4.1 at

    http://github.com/jgm/peg-markdown/tarball/0.4.1

Or, to clone the repository,

    git clone git://github.com/jgm/peg-markdown.git

In addition, Ryan Tomayko has created a ruby gem, rpeg-markdown, that
wraps peg-markdown.  He has published it on rubyforge, so you should
be able to install it with

    gem install rpeg-markdown

(If the extension fails to build, it is probably because you need to
install glib:  http://www.gtk.org/download.html.)  The source is at

    http://github.com/rtomayko/rpeg-markdown/tree/master

rpeg-markdown's API imitates BlueCloth's, so it should be easy to
replace BlueCloth with rpeg-markdown in web applications.

John