[chjj]

Thanks.

Speed was originally marked's top priority. I would say marked's approach takes advantage of the fact that v8 generates _extremely_ fast machine code for regexes. This is just something I discovered through many endless nights of benchmarking the entire markdown test suite.

Using complex regexes for the lexemes seems like a stupid idea to most people, but it allowed me to optimize marked like crazy, so much so that it beat discount(written in c) in benchmark times (It might be a little bit slower now due to the latest features. I decided to ignore speed for a while to focus on features - will get back to optimization eventually).

The downside of all of this: marked loses some extensibility, however, we implement as much extensibility as possible by exposing the token stream and renderer.

Accuracy and sanity quickly became marked's next top priority. There's a certain threshold of accuracy you want in a markdown engine (you don't want it to be too accurate because markdown.pl had a lot of bizarre behavior). That's a different story.