Comrak?

[chriskrycho]

This lets me switch from pulldown-cmark to comrak if I so desire. One big upside here: footnotes just work as they should (though with the qualifier that they have naming limitations). Speed-wise, this is slightly slower but probably still more than fast enough (and much faster than Node land shenanigans). On the other hand, this is much worse to work with than pulldown-cmark in a general sense, and I could layer in what I need in terms of footnote handling (I think!) as well as other customization (e.g. header linking) much more easily and nicely using that event-based approach… but I cannot make it treat footnotes as block-level elements; that will require investing somewhat into pulldown-cmark's internals in a way I don't love the thought of tackling. 🤷🏼‍♂️

The short version is: no great options here! I'm surprised this space isn't more solid this far along: it's not far off what it was when I first evaluated it… back in 2015–2016!