Parsoid in PHP, or there and back again

In December 2019, we replaced the original version of Parsoid, written in JavaScript, with a version written in PHP, the primary programming language of MediaWiki. This new version, called Parsoid/PHP, is roughly twice as fast as the original JavaScript version. Parsoid/PHP brings us one step closer to integrating Parsoid and other MediaWiki wikitext-handling code into a single system.

Wikipedia’s JavaScript initialisation on a budget

This week saw the conclusion of a project that I’ve been shepherding on and off since September of last year. The goal was for the initialisation of our asynchronous JavaScript pipeline (at the time, 36 kilobytes in size) to fit within a budget of 28 KB – the size of two 14 KB bursts of Internet packets.