Albert,
The truth may be as you say, but my intuitive sense of the number of separate readers, writers, and dependencies leaves me to feel that some suitable amount of engineering might produce results more optimal than the ones you suggest. I have not done any tests, of course, myself.
A few questions on your response appear below.
parsing, outputting various other formats. Many large parsers, like
those for LaTeX and HTML, are dependencies of the Markdown reader, so
This observations strikes me as quite peculiar. Would you elaborate the reasons for the dependencies?
I seem to remember that, even after removing a significant amount of
functionality, I still achieved only a meager 20% reduction in binary
Did your tests include the comprehensive elimination of unneeded library dependencies? Doing so correctly might be nontrivial as it requires having an accurate graph for dependency resolution.