Python server and JavaScript client talking via stdin/stdout to highlight code using the great pygments highlighter.
Currently the only available JavaScript wrappers for pygments fire up a new process each time some code is to be highlighted.
This is very inefficient, puts lots of unnecessary pressure on the CPU and as a result shows bad performance.
pygmentsjs aims to improve on this by creating one python process that serves highlighted code on stdout whenever a JavaScript client pushes a request via stdin.
I tried lots of different JavaScript highlighters, but keep coming back to pygments because nothing else seems to get close in generating highly readable highlighted code.