Comparison with Pygments¶

General sifferences¶

• CodeRay is a Ruby library, Pygments is written in Python.
• CodeRay supports 19 languages, while Pygments supports over 90.
• CodeRay has handwritten scanners. In Pygments, scanners are defined with a scanner DSL.

Handwritten vs. DSL, Pro & Contra¶

The last two differences in the list above are very much related.

Pro: handwritten scanners (CodeRay)¶

• faster
  • lots of fine tuning is possible
  • no overhead for DSL transformation and interpretation
• more flexible

Pro: scanner definition (Pygments)¶

• easier to write, read, and maintain
  • less code
• DSL interpreter can be optimized/changed independently
• porting scanners is easier
• use of higher-level features (like token groups) is simple

Other differences¶