micromark@4.0.2 · lil2 family · @itslil/lil2-micromark

micromark,
flat.

The CommonMark parser, rewritten in typed LilScript: tokens and events are ints in parallel arrays, positions are offsets, and every token type and construct is an int id.

npm install @itslil/lil2-micromark

Playground GitHub ↗

lil2 browser build versus minified upstream · Brotli-11 0.9%larger

13,226 B upstream (Terser) → 13,344 B lil2

2.4% largergzip-9 objective build

11.8% smallerraw objective build

0.43× the timeof upstream’s per call, Chromium 151.0.7922.34 (geometric mean)

1/3size cells smaller

Raw, gzip and Brotli each use a separate LilScript compilation targeting that objective; upstream is the smallest of Terser, esbuild and Oxc on the same API bundled for the browser.

A chat app · Playwright · phone CPUs

Streaming chats,
2.5× less CPU.

react-markdown 10.1.0 + remark-gfm, remark-math, rehype-katex → lil2 /full; main-thread time, Chromium 151
	short chat (5 replies)	average chat (20 replies)	long chat (60 replies)
CPU while the replies stream, mid-tier phone (4×)	7.1 s → 3.2 s 2.2×	29.1 s → 11.5 s 2.5×	1.3 min → 31.0 s 2.5×
CPU while the replies stream, low-end phone (6×)	11.2 s → 4.7 s 2.4×	45.9 s → 17.7 s 2.6×	2.0 min → 47.4 s 2.5×
CPU while the replies stream, this machine	1.6 s → 0.8 s 2.1×	6.8 s → 2.7 s 2.5×	17.6 s → 7.0 s 2.5×
updates slower than a frame (16.7 ms), low-end phone (6×)	125 → 6 of 1,053	671 → 6 of 4,615	1,318 → 67 of 12,897
opening the saved chat, low-end phone (6×)	417 ms → 317 ms 1.3×	843 ms → 519 ms 1.6×	1.77 s → 960 ms 1.8×

Measured through lil2-react-markdown, which this package is a layer of. LLM-style replies (lists, code, tables, math; about 2.5 KB each) streamed a few tokens at a time and rendered by React, finished messages memoized. Chrome's CPU throttling stands in for phones (4×: Lighthouse's mid-tier mobile; 6×: DevTools' low-end mobile); median of 2 runs, libraries alternating, fresh tab each. Every streamed update renders the same DOM as react-markdown (test/chat.test.mjs, Chromium and Firefox). Reproduce: npm run bench:chat.

lil2-micromark ✦ lil2-mdast-util-from-markdown ✦ lil2-mdast-util-to-hast ✦ lil2-remark-gfm ✦ lil2-remark-math ✦ lil2-rehype-katex ✦ lil2-remark-breaks ✦ lil2-react-markdown ✦ lil2-react-markdown + gfm ✦ lil2-react-markdown + gfm, math, KaTeX, breaks ✦ lil2-micromark ✦ lil2-mdast-util-from-markdown ✦ lil2-mdast-util-to-hast ✦ lil2-remark-gfm ✦ lil2-remark-math ✦ lil2-rehype-katex ✦ lil2-remark-breaks ✦ lil2-react-markdown ✦ lil2-react-markdown + gfm ✦ lil2-react-markdown + gfm, math, KaTeX, breaks

The lil2 family

This package,
then the stack.

Every layer of the react-markdown stack, rewritten bottom to top with ints for every id and enum and flat arrays for every tree. Each tab is one package: its size against minified upstream for each objective, its speed in real browsers, and the checks that its output equals upstream’s.

lil2-micromark

The CommonMark parser, rewritten in typed LilScript: tokens and events are ints in parallel arrays, positions are offsets, and every token type and construct is an int id.

GitHub ↗page ↗comparison.json ↗

Rewritesmicromark@4.0.2 APImicromark(value, allowDangerousHtml, allowDangerousProtocol) → string BehaviourSame HTML as upstream on 736 documents (the CommonMark spec, every named entity, edge cases, bench documents), safe and dangerous, in Node and in Chromium and Firefox; every event’s type, line, column and offset equal. Cells1 of 3 smaller

Both builds, in this page

Live
lab.

Left is markdown. Right is lil2-react-markdown/full rendering it as you type. Race times upstream micromark against lil2 on the current text, both loaded here.

# Notes on Fourier analysis

The Fourier transform of an integrable function $f$ is
$\hat f(\xi) = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} f(x)\, e^{-2\pi i x \xi}\, dx$, and when
$\hat f$ is integrable too the inversion formula holds:

$$
f(x) = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} \hat f(\xi)\, e^{2\pi i x \xi}\, d\xi .
$$

## Plancherel

For $f \in L^1 \cap L^2$ we have $\|f\|_2 = \|\hat f\|_2$, so the transform
extends to a unitary map on $L^2(\mathbb{R})$.

$$
\int_{\mathbb{R}} |f(x)|^2 \, dx = \int_{\mathbb{R}} |\hat f(\xi)|^2 \, d\xi
$$

## Convolution

If $h = f * g$ with $(f * g)(x) = \int f(y) g(x - y)\, dy$, then
$\hat h = \hat f \cdot \hat g$. The Gaussian $g(x) = e^{-\pi x^2}$ is its own
transform, $\hat g = g$.

| Function | Transform |
| --- | --- |
| $e^{-\pi x^2}$ | $e^{-\pi \xi^2}$ |
| $\mathbf{1}_{[-1/2, 1/2]}(x)$ | $\operatorname{sinc}(\xi) = \frac{\sin \pi \xi}{\pi \xi}$ |
| $f(x - a)$ | $e^{-2\pi i a \xi} \hat f(\xi)$ |
| $f'(x)$ | $2\pi i \xi\, \hat f(\xi)$ |

## Poisson summation

For a Schwartz function $f$:

$$
\sum_{n \in \mathbb{Z}} f(n) = \sum_{k \in \mathbb{Z}} \hat f(k)
$$

Applied to $f(x) = e^{-\pi t x^2}$ this gives the theta identity
$\theta(t) = t^{-1/2}\, \theta(1/t)$ where $\theta(t) = \sum_n e^{-\pi n^2 t}$.

## A matrix

$$
\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c & d \end{pmatrix}^{-1}
= \frac{1}{ad - bc} \begin{pmatrix} d & -b \\ -c & a \end{pmatrix},
\qquad ad - bc \neq 0 .
$$

- [x] inversion
- [x] Plancherel
- [ ] uncertainty principle: $\Delta x\, \Delta \xi \ge \frac{1}{4\pi}$

The output is rendered by the shipped browser build; the race runs each side for 400 ms after a warm-up.

Browser build · minified upstream

Three objectives.
Measured separately.

Raw46,829 B

11.8% smaller than original

Terser · 53,097 B

gzip-915,137 B

2.4% larger than original

Terser · 14,785 B

Brotli-1113,344 B

0.9% larger than original

Terser · 13,226 B

Current LilScript versus minified original
Compiler objective	LilScript	Original minified	Original minifier	Difference
Raw	46,829 B	53,097 B	Terser	11.8% smaller
gzip-9	15,137 B	14,785 B	Terser	2.4% larger
Brotli-11	13,344 B	13,226 B	Terser	0.9% larger

Each LilScript row comes from a separate compilation targeting that row’s objective. Raw is uncompressed JavaScript; gzip uses level 9; Brotli uses quality 11 and window 22. For each metric, the original is the smallest result among the minifiers below. No JavaScript minifier runs after LilScript.

Every artifact, measured with all three codecs

Artifact	Raw	gzip-9	Brotli-11
LilScript · Raw objective	46,829 B	15,910 B	14,022 B
LilScript · gzip-9 objective	48,588 B	15,137 B	13,309 B
LilScript · Brotli-11 objective	48,247 B	15,199 B	13,344 B
Original · Terser 5.51.2	53,097 B	14,785 B	13,226 B
Original · esbuild 0.28.1	54,344 B	15,820 B	14,121 B
Original · Oxc vite 8.2.1	53,186 B	15,002 B	13,389 B

Browser builds on both sides: lil2’s `browser` condition and upstream bundled by esbuild 0.28.1 with the browser condition (`export {micromark} from 'micromark'`). Upstream: micromark@4.0.2. No external runtime imports. CSS, fonts, type declarations and source maps are outside these JavaScript sizes.

Measurements, hashes and settings ↗ · Commands and build receipts ↗

Real browsers · identical output first

Speed.

Chromium 151.0.7922.34 · median per call, identical output checked first
Document	Upstream	lil2	Time
chat	0.567 ms	0.244 ms	0.43×
readme	13.950 ms	6.133 ms	0.44×
large	146.800 ms	60.800 ms	0.41×
load (import)	4.3 ms	4.7 ms	1.09×
first call, cold	9.4 ms	8.9 ms	0.95×

Firefox 153.0 · median per call, identical output checked first
Document	Upstream	lil2	Time
chat	1.100 ms	0.500 ms	0.45×
readme	28.000 ms	12.000 ms	0.43×
large	279.000 ms	115.000 ms	0.41×
load (import)	8.0 ms	9.0 ms	1.13×
first call, cold	12.0 ms	9.0 ms	0.75×

Playwright, one fresh browser context per lane; lanes interleave and alternate order every round. Upstream is the same API bundled from npm for the browser; lil2 is the shipped browser build. Load is the module import after the file is fetched; first call is the first document, cold.

Same machine · sequential builds

Build time.

Build wall time on the same machine
Output objective	LilScript compilation	Original bundling + minification	Original minifier
Raw	9.77 s	0.837 s	Terser
gzip-9	9.77 s	0.837 s	Terser
Brotli-11	10.00 s	0.837 s	Terser

One fresh output build per objective and minifier, run sequentially. LilScript compilation includes optimization and objective scoring with persistent caches disabled and one worker. Original time includes Node startup, esbuild bundling of installed upstream ESM, and the named minifier. It excludes building the upstream package from its original TypeScript sources. Dependency installation, tests and final file compression are excluded on both sides. These are observations on a shared machine, not a build-speed guarantee.

AMD EPYC 7763 64-Core Processor · 8 logical CPUs · 15.6 GiB RAM · Linux 7.0.0-1014-azure · Node v20.19.0. Measured 2026-10-04. Exact commands and compiler identity ↗

Install

Typed, flat,
same output.

npm install @itslil/lil2-micromark

micromark,flat.

Streaming chats,2.5× less CPU.

This package,then the stack.