Highlight.js takes a very long time to prepare?

[tom-sherman]

I'm setting up a snowpack project with React + Spectacle.

The preperation of dependencies goes about as fast as I'm used to from other projects (ie. very fast), until it hits highlight.js.

This dependency has many files under lib/languages, but because of their tiny size I wouldn't expect them to take so long to prepare? Yet they take a few seconds per file. Could someone explain why this happens and if it's possible to improve it?

Here's an example of one of the files (haskell)

module.exports = function(hljs) {
  var COMMENT = {
    variants: [
      hljs.COMMENT('--', '$'),
      hljs.COMMENT(
        '{-',
        '-}',
        {
          contains: ['self']
        }
      )
    ]
  };

  var PRAGMA = {
    className: 'meta',
    begin: '{-#', end: '#-}'
  };

  var PREPROCESSOR = {
    className: 'meta',
    begin: '^#', end: '$'
  };

  var CONSTRUCTOR = {
    className: 'type',
    begin: '\\b[A-Z][\\w\']*', // TODO: other constructors (build-in, infix).
    relevance: 0
  };

  var LIST = {
    begin: '\\(', end: '\\)',
    illegal: '"',
    contains: [
      PRAGMA,
      PREPROCESSOR,
      {className: 'type', begin: '\\b[A-Z][\\w]*(\\((\\.\\.|,|\\w+)\\))?'},
      hljs.inherit(hljs.TITLE_MODE, {begin: '[_a-z][\\w\']*'}),
      COMMENT
    ]
  };

  var RECORD = {
    begin: '{', end: '}',
    contains: LIST.contains
  };

  return {
    aliases: ['hs'],
    keywords:
      'let in if then else case of where do module import hiding ' +
      'qualified type data newtype deriving class instance as default ' +
      'infix infixl infixr foreign export ccall stdcall cplusplus ' +
      'jvm dotnet safe unsafe family forall mdo proc rec',
    contains: [

      // Top-level constructions.

      {
        beginKeywords: 'module', end: 'where',
        keywords: 'module where',
        contains: [LIST, COMMENT],
        illegal: '\\W\\.|;'
      },
      {
        begin: '\\bimport\\b', end: '$',
        keywords: 'import qualified as hiding',
        contains: [LIST, COMMENT],
        illegal: '\\W\\.|;'
      },

      {
        className: 'class',
        begin: '^(\\s*)?(class|instance)\\b', end: 'where',
        keywords: 'class family instance where',
        contains: [CONSTRUCTOR, LIST, COMMENT]
      },
      {
        className: 'class',
        begin: '\\b(data|(new)?type)\\b', end: '$',
        keywords: 'data family type newtype deriving',
        contains: [PRAGMA, CONSTRUCTOR, LIST, RECORD, COMMENT]
      },
      {
        beginKeywords: 'default', end: '$',
        contains: [CONSTRUCTOR, LIST, COMMENT]
      },
      {
        beginKeywords: 'infix infixl infixr', end: '$',
        contains: [hljs.C_NUMBER_MODE, COMMENT]
      },
      {
        begin: '\\bforeign\\b', end: '$',
        keywords: 'foreign import export ccall stdcall cplusplus jvm ' +
                  'dotnet safe unsafe',
        contains: [CONSTRUCTOR, hljs.QUOTE_STRING_MODE, COMMENT]
      },
      {
        className: 'meta',
        begin: '#!\\/usr\\/bin\\/env\ runhaskell', end: '$'
      },

      // "Whitespaces".

      PRAGMA,
      PREPROCESSOR,

      // Literals and names.

      // TODO: characters.
      hljs.QUOTE_STRING_MODE,
      hljs.C_NUMBER_MODE,
      CONSTRUCTOR,
      hljs.inherit(hljs.TITLE_MODE, {begin: '^[_a-z][\\w\']*'}),

      COMMENT,

      {begin: '->|<-'} // No markup, relevance booster
    ]
  };
};

I can create a reproduction repo but all I did was npx create-snowpack-app . --template @snowpack/app-template-react-typescript --force, npm i spectacle and npm run start.