Highlights: A WAT-Written Syntax Highlighter Up to 298x Faster Than Shiki
seatedro · x · 2026-10-22
Pierre Computer Company released Highlights, a syntax highlighter written in WebAssembly Text (WAT). It supports 70+ built-in languages, Zed-compatible themes, HTML or themed token output, plus streaming input and incremental edits.
Benchmarks (Bun 1.4.0, Apple M4 Pro) show up to 298x Shiki's HTML throughput (320 MiB/s vs 1.07 MiB/s on a large TypeScript file) and well over 30x Tree-sitter (N-API). The team built it after Shiki plus workers and caches became a bottleneck for their Diffs editing features. The benchmark is open and reproducible.
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