Several of my projects do heavy markdown parsing. Comment rendering, documentation pipelines, content management. The volume keeps growing, and I've been hitting the point where pure-PHP parsers (Parsedown, league/commonmark, cebe/markdown, michelf) just can't keep up. They're solid libraries, but parsing thousands of documents per request or chewing through 200 KB files in interpreted PHP is slow no matter how well the code is written. I wanted something 10x+ faster that could serve as a drop-in replacement for the common cases. The result is mdparser , a native C extension that wraps cmark-gfm (GitHub's CommonMark parser) and exposes it through a clean PHP 8.3+ OO API. I'm releasing it today. How it works mdparser vendors a copy of cmark-gfm 0.29.0.gfm.13 directly into the extension's shared object. No external library to link against, no cmake, no runtime dependencies. The entire cmark-gfm codebase compiles alongside the PHP wrapper into a single .so (or .dll on Windows).…