Templating Libraries in Go: A Performance Comparison
Go’s standard library provides a powerful templating engine, but there are also several community-built templating libraries available. With so many options, it can be difficult to choose the best one for your project. In this article, we’ll compare the performance of four popular templating libraries in Go: template/text, pongo2, liquid, and quicktemplate.
Template/Text: The Standard Library Option
Go’s standard library provides a fully-featured and powerful templating engine. It’s widely used in production and is a popular choice among developers.
Performance
The template/text package is highly performant and well-optimized. It provides reasonable performance for conditionals, loops, and function calls.
String Substitution
String substitution is fast in template/text, especially when using structs as data contexts.
Conditionals
Conditionals are vital operations for template engines. Template/text provides support for if operations, with support for and and or operations.
Pongo2: A Community-Built Option
Pongo2 is a community-built template engine with syntax inspired by Django-syntax. It’s a popular choice among developers, with over 2,000 stars on GitHub.
Performance
Pongo2 is well-optimized for function calls within templates. It’s a full template engine with loops, conditionals, and nested templates.
String Substitution
String substitution is slower in Pongo2 compared to template/text.
Conditionals
Pongo2 has more developer-friendly syntax for if/else statements.
Liquid: Another Community-Built Option
Liquid is a community-built implementation of Shopify’s template language. It provides a fully featured templating library.
Performance
Liquid is quite performant, with a full template engine featuring loops, conditionals, and nested templates.
String Substitution
String substitution performance is comparable to Pongo2.
Conditionals
Liquid has very developer-friendly syntax for if/else statements.
Quicktemplate: A Precompiled Option
Quicktemplate is a precompiled template engine that converts templates into Go code. It’s very fast, as it doesn’t perform any reflection and everything is run through a compiler optimizer.
Performance
Quicktemplate is a good choice if your templates don’t need to be changed frequently.
Choosing the Right Templating Library
Each templating library has its own pros and cons. Pongo2 offers a bit more developer-friendly syntax than template/text, but template/text provides better performance overall. Quicktemplate is a good choice if your templates don’t need to be changed frequently. Ultimately, the choice of templating library depends on your specific project needs.