Highlights: Hand-written WASM Syntax Highlighter Beats Shiki by Up to 298x on Large Files
cnakazawa · x · 2026-10-22
The Pierre Computer Co. launched Highlights, a syntax highlighter that outputs HTML, positioned as a drop-in replacement for Shiki in Diffs.
Key facts:
- Hand-written in WebAssembly Text, with built-in lexers, runs across JS runtimes, Shiki-compatible output
- Up to 298x Shiki's throughput on a 517 KiB TypeScript file (also 220x HTML, 244x CSS, 157x JSONC)
- Median peak memory 50 MiB vs 155 MiB (Shiki JS) and 349 MiB (Shiki Wasm)
- Processed 5.56M chars of JavaScript in 0.09s in-browser, beating gpu-lexer (0.40s) and Prism.js (1.25s)
Benchmarked October 2026 on M4 Pro with Bun 1.4.0; install via pnpm install @pierre/highlights.
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