This repo tries to assess Rust markdown parsing performance.

We currently compare:

• comrak
• minimad
• pulldown-cmark
• markdown

Formerly, we compared:

• mini_markdown: author is unwilling to follow cargo's variant of semver

Suggestions:

• Generally, pulldown-cmark

Results

Name	Overhead (release)	Build (debug)	Parse (release)	Downloads	Version
null	0 KiB	193ms	1ms	-	-
comrak	2,767 KiB	14s	2ms		v0.50.0
jotdown	222 KiB	1s	2ms		v0.9.1
markdown	1,026 KiB	1s	11ms		v1.0.0
minimad	29 KiB	544ms	2ms		v0.14.0
pulldown-cmark	440 KiB	2s	2ms		v0.13.1

System: Linux 6.17.9-76061709-generic (x86_64), rustc 1.94.0 (4a4ef493e 2026-03-02) w/ -j 8

Notes:

• Overhead will be lower if your application shares dependencies with your argument parsing library.

Running the Benchmarks

$ ./bench.py
$ ./format.py