baseplate.go VS maud

We chose to use govips which is a cgo wrapper around the libvips image manipulation library. The majority of new development for services in our backend is written using baseplate.go. But Go is not an ideal choice for media processing as it cannot keep up with the performance of native code. The most widely used image-processing libraries like libmagick are primarily written in C or C++. Speed was a major factor in selecting libvips in order to keep latency low on CDN cache misses for images. In our tests, libvips was 3–4 times faster than libmagick on basic image processing operations. Content-aware smart cropping was implemented by porting smartcrop.js to Go. This is the only operation implemented in pure Go.

Even Reddit has python backends https://github.com/reddit/baseplate.py based on Pyramid. They also have a go one. https://github.com/reddit/baseplate.go

there's a multitude of services in reddit's architecture. as far as i can tell, they mostly using reddit's baseplate framework (which has implementations in both python and go).

FWIW, I believe Reddit has rewritten some Python into Go because of scaling issues. I don't know of any public write ups to confirm it, but at the least there's a public repo that contains their base template.

Gazette Inference Service is a baseplate.go (Reddit’s golang web services framework) thrift service whose single responsibility is serving ML inference requests to it’s clients. It is deployed with Reddit’s modern kubernetes infrastructure.

Baseplate is implemented in Python and Go, and although they share the same main functionality, smaller features differ between the two. One such feature that was previously on the Go implementation but not Python was deadline budget propagation, which passes on the remaining timeout available from the initial client request all the way through the server and any other requests that may follow. The lack of this feature in Baseplate.py meant that many resources were being wasted by servers doing unnecessary work, despite clients no longer awaiting their response due to timeout.

I would like to mention maud in this context:

https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

It is refreshingly different from other Rust templating libraries. It uses a proc-macro that compiles your HTML into Rust code. I also happen to use it in conjunction with HTMX and it works very well for me (at least in small projects).

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

I think a lot of us reach for Jinja-style templates so it feels a little more like we're writing bare HTML. But they're of course still just templates, and they need a build step before they become valid HTML.

So it's true, if you're willing to use a DSL embedded in your server language (like JSX), then you'll have the full language tooling available to you. And this probably isn't giving up much over language-specific templates.

A JSX-equivalent for the Rust server-side rendering world would probably be maud [1] or leptops [2].

[1] https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

[2] https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos

Maud as a performant templating engine that will ensure your templates are well-formed at compile-time and, in effect, minify the generated HTML output by not passing through unnecessary whitespace.

Maud is a fast Slim/Haml-esque templating engine which will automatically minify your HTML at no extra charge because whitespace isn't significant in its syntax.

If you want to do backend development, give actix-web or Axum a try. If you need templating, take a look at Maud and if you want an ORM, take a look at SeaORM.

Personally, I'd recommend Maud if you don't need something with runtime reloading. Not only is it much faster, it implements a template language that is effectively the Rust-syntax equivalent to Slim or Haml using a procedural macro, so you get compile-time verification that your HTML output is well-formed.

For templating, Maud is fast, gives compile-time well-formedness guarantees, and outputs minified HTML by default as a side-effect of it being based on Rust macros. (It's of a similar design philosophy to Slim and Haml)