Leandro Pereira on MDEx

About this episode

Leandro Pereira discusses his Rust-powered Markdown library MDEx and its implications for Elixir developers.

Leandro Pereira is back on the Elixir Mentor Podcast — this time to dive deep into MDEx, his Rust-powered Markdown library for Elixir. MDEx is built on the Comrak Rust crate, runs 31x faster, and uses 3,500x less memory than existing Elixir alternatives. We also get into Lumis, his standalone syntax highlighting engine powered by tree-sitter and Neovim themes. Leandro walks through why he chose a Rust NIF over a pure Elixir implementation, what it took to ship Lumis as its own project, and the surprisingly hard technical challenge at the heart of MDEx: streaming Markdown for AI applications. We discuss how MDEx handles incomplete Markdown fragments in real time, what the upcoming Components feature unlocks for Phoenix/LiveView developers, and how the HEEx parser integration works under the hood. We also cover the human side of maintaining two solo open source projects: how Leandro prioritizes, uses AI to chip away at the backlog, and thinks about monetization. The conversation goes deeper into how the AI era has changed Markdown's role in the ecosystem, the pitfalls of vibe coding, and what it really takes to get an open source project noticed — including the uncomfortable truth…

People in this episode

Host: Jacob Luetzow

Guest: Leandro Pereira

Topics covered

• Markdown library
• Rust integration
• Open source projects
• AI applications
• Developer growth
• Functional programming

Keywords

• MDEx
• Lumis
• Rust
• Markdown
• Elixir
• AI
• open source
• developer growth
• functional programming

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Rust, Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView, tree-sitter, Neovim

Products: MDEx, Lumis

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