For the League's CommonMark parser, we chose to prioritize extensibility over performance. This led to a decoupled object-oriented design which users can easily and customize. This has enabled others to build their own integrations, extensions, and other custom projects.

The library's performance is still decent - the end user probably can't differentiate between 42ms and 2ms (you should be caching your rendered Markdown anyway). Nevertheless, we still wanted to optimize our parser as much as possible without compromising our primary goals. This blog post explains how we used Blackfire to do just that.