21.6% smaller than original
Terser · 95,678 Bremark-gfm@4.0.1 · lil2 family · @itslil/lil2-remark-gfm
remark-gfm,
flat.
GitHub Flavored Markdown on the flat pipeline: autolink literals, footnotes, strikethrough, tables and task lists, with int token types, construct ids, identifiers and alignments.
npm install @itslil/lil2-remark-gfm23,016 B upstream (Terser) → 20,971 B lil2
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.
| 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.
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-remark-gfm
GitHub Flavored Markdown on the flat pipeline: autolink literals, footnotes, strikethrough, tables and task lists, with int token types, construct ids, identifiers and alignments.
remark-gfm@4.0.1
APIfromMarkdown(value, singleTilde) · markdownToHast(value, allowDangerousHtml)
BehaviourSame mdast and hast as upstream on 1,453 documents (the whole GFM spec, cmark-gfm’s extension tests, edge cases, the CommonMark corpus), in Node and in Chromium and Firefox.
Cells3 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 remark-gfm against lil2 on the current text, both loaded here.
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.
7.7% smaller than original
Terser · 26,065 B8.9% smaller than original
Terser · 23,016 B| Compiler objective | LilScript | Original minified | Original minifier | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raw | 74,981 B | 95,678 B | Terser | 21.6% smaller |
| gzip-9 | 24,071 B | 26,065 B | Terser | 7.7% smaller |
| Brotli-11 | 20,971 B | 23,016 B | Terser | 8.9% smaller |
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 | 74,981 B | 25,422 B | 22,032 B |
| LilScript · gzip-9 objective | 76,914 B | 24,071 B | 21,051 B |
| LilScript · Brotli-11 objective | 77,773 B | 24,038 B | 20,971 B |
| Original · Terser 5.51.2 | 95,678 B | 26,065 B | 23,016 B |
| Original · esbuild 0.28.1 | 98,155 B | 28,143 B | 24,862 B |
| Original · Oxc vite 8.2.1 | 96,112 B | 26,624 B | 23,455 B |
Browser builds on both sides: lil2’s `browser` condition and upstream bundled by esbuild 0.28.1 with the browser condition (`export {fromMarkdown} from 'mdast-util-from-markdown'; export {gfm} from 'micromark-extension-gfm'; export {gfmFromMarkdown} from 'mdast-util-gfm'; export {toHast} from 'mdast-util-to-hast'`). Upstream: remark-gfm@4.0.1. 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.
| Document | Upstream | lil2 | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| gfm | 13.600 ms | 5.350 ms | 0.39× |
| readme | 22.400 ms | 8.450 ms | 0.38× |
| load (import) | 5.8 ms | 6.0 ms | 1.03× |
| first call, cold | 57.0 ms | 46.2 ms | 0.81× |
| Document | Upstream | lil2 | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| gfm | 27.000 ms | 12.000 ms | 0.44× |
| readme | 39.000 ms | 17.000 ms | 0.44× |
| load (import) | 13.0 ms | 13.0 ms | 1.00× |
| first call, cold | 73.0 ms | 50.0 ms | 0.68× |
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.
| Output objective | LilScript compilation | Original bundling + minification | Original minifier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raw | 18.86 s | 0.828 s | Terser |
| gzip-9 | 18.86 s | 0.828 s | Terser |
| Brotli-11 | 6.45 s | 0.828 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-remark-gfm