Mistune vs other Markdown libraries?

[irskep]

How conscious was the choice to use Mistune? I ask because the markdown library has an extension to add anchors to headings, but Mistune does not.

[cu]

Oh it's quite a long story. :) I spent the better part of a week or two just looking at all of the Python markdown renderers that existed. At one point, I even had a Jupyter notebook to compare them all side-by-side. It's been a couple of years now but if I had to guess, I would say that Mistune:

• Had all of the syntax that I wanted
• Was smaller, simpler, and faster than most others
• Was fairly straightforward to extend to add various features
• Does not bring in any other dependencies

I did look into writing a renderer to add anchors to headings at some point. As I recall, this meant duplicating most of the Mistune header renderer code, but maybe I'm misremembering.

[irskep]

I wonder if the best thing would be to contribute anchor links in headers directly to Mistune.