As I was experimenting with the Developer Guide, we noticed unusually
slow load times with its merged First Steps chapter. Guilhem looked into
it and discovered the Python based syntax highlighting utility was
spawning new shells for each code block like some kind of lunatic!
Guilhem tested another MediaWiki extension based on highlight.js, but it
had issues and is not actively maintained.
Luckily, I found a nice extension written by Scratch contributor
apple502j:
https://github.com/InternationalScratchWiki/SyntaxHighlight_PrismJS
It uses prism.js: https://prismjs.com/
It was tested in our testwiki and is now deployed in production. The
load time of the dev guide First Steps chapter is like 50x faster now.
The chapter in question:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/DevGuide/First_Steps
Ilmari
