jointhefreeworld

jointhefreeworld is the personal site of Joe, a developer who writes about Lisp-family languages, Guile, and the tooling built around Org mode. The blog mixes project updates with technical essays, and the tone is candid about trade-offs and unfinished work. It reads like an engineering notebook made public rather than a polished publication.

The centerpiece of this page is OrgWebAlchemy, a Guile library that parses Org mode with a Parsing Expression Grammar and renders it to HTML, Markdown, or SXML. The article documents newly added Markdown rendering, support for figures, named elements, and real table rows, plus a performance effort that made parsing roughly 6.4x faster on a 58 KB document. Profiling revealed a quadratic collapse pass and a per-character scanner, and the author explains both fixes and how correctness was verified.

Readers who benefit most are Lisp and Scheme developers, Org mode power users, and anyone curious about parser performance work. The posts assume comfort with programming concepts and command-line tooling, and they often link to source repositories for follow-up.

Use the blog as a reference when you need concrete methodology for benchmarking or profiling, or when you want to understand how a PEG-based parser is structured. Start with the OrgWebAlchemy article if performance interests you, and browse the archive for related Lisp topics. Expect long reads and reproducible numbers rather than quick summaries.