sailfish VS maud

Any recommendations for rust template engines? I'd like something that can easily render labeled fragments of a template instead of requiring me to split a page into a dozen little files. Kinda like inline {{block}} definitions in Go's html/template. Speed is also nice.

From template-benchmark-rs [0] I found sailfish [1] (fast, but no fragments(?)). render-rs [2] and syn-rsx [3] (2022) both let you write html in rust macros which is cool (maybe that can substitute for fragments?). Then there's gtmpl-rust [4] which is just Go templates reimplemented in rust.

[0]: https://github.com/rosetta-rs/template-benchmarks-rs

[1]: https://github.com/rust-sailfish/sailfish

[2]: https://github.com/render-rs/render.rs last updated Jul 2020

[3]: https://github.com/stoically/syn-rsx last updated Nov 2022

[4]: https://github.com/fiji-flo/gtmpl-rust

Sailfish (very fast, but lots of unsafe usages)

(Sailfish is fastest, but it's syntax is of the more traditional <%= msg %> flavour and Markup.rs is second-fastest with a Maud-like syntax but the author apparently doesn't have time to rewrite the syntax reference, so you have to follow a link from the open issue to an old version of the README.)

Using [Actix](actix.rs/), Sailfish, thiserror, and a bunch of supporting libraries reminds me of when I was building a project using Pylons and Mako (now replaced with Pyramid), except without the SQL.

If you're OK with a template engine that can't be used in any sort of "if debug builds, support hot reloading" mode, Sailfish compiles its templates to native code and it's the fastest option around.

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)