templ VS quicktemplate

✨ In recent months, I have been developing web projects using GOTTHA stack: Go + Templ + Tailwind CSS + htmx + Alpine.js. As soon as I'm ready to talk about all the subtleties and pitfalls, I'll post it on my social networks.

Templ - HTML templating for Go

html/template - we will be using the standard HTML templating library built into Go. It is a great library and perfect for simple things like this, though if you have a more complicated project (I assume you do), I would look into using something like templ.

Cool project and if it works for you and you're happy, that's all what counts.

When I read the article, I was thinking that Go templates were used wrong. I was thinking there must be a way to define the template so you inject the content and don't need to define the start and the end of the html, but instead yield a block of other html as some kind of argument. I was trying to look it up, but couldn't find documentation on this. Maybe the author is right and I'm wrong.

And I was wondering why the author isn't using something like Templ [0], which is kind of JSX with Go as hosting language. Probably because it needs the preprocessor / compile step?

[0] https://github.com/a-h/templ

Here are a couple:

https://github.com/julvo/htmlgo

https://github.com/rohanthewiz/element

I'm sure there are many more.

The thing about these is that performance is often not as good as when using templates, especially when the templates are compiled to native code. Quicktemplate [1] is still the leader here IMO, and I don't think the OP project brings much that couldn't be done pretty easily with QT.

[1] https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate

From my experience you don't really need a distinct frontend framework for web development in Go. I've been able to use quicktemplate for some of my projects for rendering HTML pretty effectively. I've written about using it here.

If the question is about templating libraries, then I've seen people use other libraries than the html/template, like https://github.com/hoisie/mustache or https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate

I originally started out trying to add features to quicktemplate, but didn't get any engagement, so went my own way: https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate/issues/80

I've been using quick template with htmx and I'm really enjoying the combo. As a mostly backend developer it's a pretty intuitive approach. Now if someone could just build something to simplify working with CSS...

Like with the previous post, we're going to use djinn-ci/imgsrv as an example of using multiple sources in a build manifest. If we look at the top of the manifest file, we will see that it requires three repositories to build. These are, the source code for djinn-ci/imgsrv itself, golang/tools, and valyala/quicktemplate, defined like so,

I like Hugo quite a lot, but I don't like Go's standard library templates. I wonder if it is possible to use https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate with Hugo?

For encoding, the receivers usually want very specific encoding (namespaces, nil as xsi:nil, not omitted value...) - templating with text/template or github.com/valyala/quicktemplate is easier on the long run, than fight with xml.Marshal and the other end's unspoken assumptions.

The "Hello World" example is up at https://github.com/a-h/qt-lsp - it's called qt-lsp because I started down this track looking to build IDE support for quicktemplate - https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate/issues/80 - but didn't think it was practical when I dug into the design of quicktemplate more.