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Comment by EmilStenstrom | Hacker News Reader

Depending on your perspective, you can take away any of the two points.

The first iteration of the project created a library from scratch, from the tests all the way to 100% test coverage. So even without the second iteration, it's still possible to create something new.

In an attempt to speed it up, I (with coding agent) rewrote it again based on html5ever's code structure. It's far from a clean port, because it's heavily optimized Rust code, that isn't possible to port to Python (Rust marcos). And it still depended on a lot of iteration and rerunning tests to get it anywhere.

I'm not pushing any agenda here, you're free to take what you want from it!

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I just had Codex CLI figure out where that first version ended and the new one began.

It looks to me like this is the last commit before the rewrite: https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/tree/989b70818874d...

The commit after that is https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/commit/7bab3d2 "radical: replace legacy TurboHTML tree/handler stack with new tokenizer + treebuilder scaffold"

It also adds this document called html5ever_port_plan.md: https://github.com/EmilStenstrom/justhtml/blob/7bab3d22c0da0...

Here's the Codex CLI transcript I used to figure this out: https://gistpreview.github.io/?53202706d137c82dce87d729263df...

Thank you for the clarification, that was not entirely clear to me from the post.

You also mention that the current "optimised" version is "good enough" for every-day use (I use `bs4` for working with html), was the first iteration also usable in that way? Did you look at `html5ever` because the LLM hit a wall trying to speed it up?

It was usable! Yeah, the handler based architecture that I had built on was very dependent on object lookups and method calls, and my hunch was that I had hit a wall trying to optimize the speed. I was slower than html5lib still, so decided to go with another "code architecture" (html5ever) that was closer to the metal. Worked out in getting me ~60% faster than html5lib.

As for bs4, if you don't change the default, you get the stdlib html.parser, which doesn't implement html5. Only works for valid HTML.

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