commonmark

cmark

C2017–2025

commonmark / cmark

cmark

CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

7Distinct people

9Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-10-03 09:17:01 UTC to 2025-03-31 00:58:36 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	1	1
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

9 sources

tiehuis·Mar 31, 2025

Using a portable minimal markdown dependency (such as cmark [1]) I think markdown can be quite a low barrier here. I personally do similar to what you have described on my blog, with an additional cmark conversion and find it quite simple [2]. [1] https://github.com/commonmark/cmark [2] https://github.com/tiehuis/tiehuis.github.io/blob/38b0fd58a2...

In Why is this site built with C

JonChesterfield·Jun 26, 2024

markdown -> xml -> hack around -> html is essentially a static site generator. https://github.com/commonmark/cmark works really well.

In Igneous Linearizer: semi-structured source code

JonChesterfield·Mar 29, 2024

I use GNU make and obsidian. Write content in markdown, feed it to https://github.com/commonmark/cmark to create html. I intended to splice files together using xslt but echo and cat written in the makefile sufficed. Plumbing is a bit obfuscated, not sure I've written it down anywhere. I write/edit files in obsidian or emacs. The obsidian sync feature copies those to a pi5 which also runs obsidian. That stashes whatever is in the directory into a fossil repo as a backup / sync to other machines mechanism. Something runs make periodically to rebuild the site which gets copied back into obsidian and thus ends up back on whatever device I'm using to edit the files. A simpler setup would involve committing markdown to a github repo and having a cron/make somewhere pull from that, rebuild the site, commit to the same or a different github repo

Read the rest

In Ask HN: What's the simplest static website generator?

JonChesterfield·Jan 8, 2024

I seem to be in the middle of trying to build something similar to this. I want it to run on an android phone but otherwise the same sort of idea, offline-first information I want access to. There's some weirdness around android browsers refusing to load html from the phone itself on security grounds. The OP uses a "progressive web app" which seems to be the proper way to do this at some point in the past, but firefox has killed that for some reason. Thus the most difficult part of the project seems to be persuading my phone to render html without copying the files to some server (or running a fileserver on the phone itself, to look at from the phone, which seems absurd). What I can offer for people stumbling down the same path: - Obsidian works fine as for ad hoc authoring of markdown while walking around - It is known on stack overflow

Read the rest

that markdown can't be sanely parsed into an AST - That knowledge is kind of a branding misfire, the 'markdown' one is looking for is here https://github.com/commonmark/cmark - That cmark binary + some foreach-file style script will turn markdown into html or xml. If you choose makefile and put spaces in the name of files you'll have a moderately bad few minutes cursing your tools - Given that output xml/html, you can build whatever other html you see fit. I'm doing that with xslt but people are telling me not to - That html can be written back to the obsidian vault and opened by a phone browser (at least if it's a single file) - Obsidian doesn't really do headless, but leaving it running on one machine which repeatedly calls "make" to write the *.html files back into the vault works fine - CSS thus far appears to be required, I was really hoping to annotate the html instead First 90% done here, second 90% to go.

In Building a personal internet from Markdown files

nickjj·Aug 19, 2021

> After Rust, giving up a bit of performance to not have to maintain the C code underneath seems preferred Yeah no doubt about it, although in this case the C implementation has been a long running project that's under the official commonmark GitHub repo at https://github.com/commonmark/cmark. But I think the most important thing here is an Elixir NIF already exists to use it. The blog post as is leaves readers having to implement ~100 lines of Elixir code to use the Rust version because the author of the blog post didn't include that code in the article, or open source it as a library for others to use. From a reader's POV if your goal is to get a highly stable, fast and safe Markdown parser running in Elixir, the Elixir cmark library I linked in a parent comment solves that problem out of the box.

In Using Rust with Elixir for code reuse and performance

chubot·Jan 7, 2021

I just use the small reference C implementation of CommonMark and it works great: https://github.com/commonmark/cmark There is an example where you load it via shared library in Python, i.e. send a Markdown string and get back an HTML string.

In My stack is HTML+CSS

kjksf·Mar 5, 2018

Port https://github.com/commonmark/cmark from C to Go. Go has decent markdown parsers (I maintain one at https://github.com/gomarkdown/markdown/) but there is no parser that does CommonMark. That would be a valuable addition to Go ecosystem and the project is well scoped (and there is existing test suite so you'll know if the code works or not).

In Golang Developer

cptaffe·Dec 25, 2017

The reference implementation of CommonMark, cmark (https://github.com/commonmark/cmark) > cmark can render a Markdown version of War and Peace in the blink of an eye (127 milliseconds on a ten year old laptop, vs. 100-400 milliseconds for an eye blink). In our benchmarks, cmark is 10,000 times faster than the original Markdown.pl, and on par with the very fastest available Markdown processors.

In Show HN: Sundown – an alternative to Markdown

liuw·Oct 3, 2017Submission

CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C

1 points · Open discussion