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  • Hacker News
  • How does zt compare to zmpl, another popular zig templating engine?

    https://github.com/jetzig-framework/zmpl

    by infogulch
  • > Then I saw Ziex and I was amazed. It never occurred to me that the JSX approach could be done outside of JavaScript.

    It never occurred to me, either! This is really neat! How does it work?

    EDIT: Never mind, seems like it's a custom file format that gets compiled to Zig code. Still quite neat but unfortunately you lose all the IDE support.

    by codethief
  • In the spirit of the author's own experienced Ch-ch-changes: I wouldn't even be reading a post like this if it weren't for agentic-coding

    Sure I hack a 'Sup World in C every 100 years just to get that feeling you get when you stumble into semi-accomplishment but to consider a low-level lang executable as a product that I produce, maintain and develop expertise/taste with?

    Regarding web dev in any low-level lang: once you get that there's a parenthetical "services" between the words "web" and "development", the quest for the languages that offer speed, reliability, etc becomes inevitable

    by fitsumbelay
  • i'm also using a "type safe" templating engine (for kotlin, as a gradle plugin) of my own design that goes the other way - instead of embedding a model class into the template, a template class is generated that takes all the values as parameters.

    i.e. MyTemplate.tpl.html

        {if $foo}hello world, {$myname}!{else}goodbye, world.{/if}
    which creates a kotlin class that can be used like this:

        MyTemplate(
      foo = true,
      myname = "bar"
    ).toString()
    the biggest upside for me is that this way there's full, free IDE support, i don't need to write extra view models if the mapping isn't 1:1 and performance is pretty good because in the end there's no runtime parsing/compiling/interpreting except for the baseline JDK stuff (though there are even faster engines).

    https://codeberg.org/h34tnet/tempolin

    warning: so far i'm the only user though, so don't use it in production. also, i'm working on some improvements right now which haven't been pushed yet.

    by stefs
  • W3C: Why can't we just have <includes src="./header.html"> and be done with it?
    by fergie
  • I love this design, especially as it takes advantage of the Zig build chain; I expect re-builds will be fast enough that you essentially get JS-style hot reloading in the dev cycle. Now we just need https://github.com/air-verse/air for Zig (Ziex has one built into its CLI, but that's only for Ziex)...

    Looking forward to seeing some benchmarks!

    by solatic
  • I kinda like kotlinx.html in Kotlin; it's an eDSL for writing HTML in actual Kotlin. So I can put break points in my template code. It's a tiny bit slower than string-with-some-interpolation type of template libraries; but it's so little that it's a price I'm willing to pay. Also there's more impact on compile times than with string-with-some-interpolation type of template libraries.

    The typesafety you get is what you already have in Kotlin, and there a little extra in that you cannot nest certain HTML-elements in certain other elements (adhering to the HTML spec). You can come up with your own elements and attributes, but the ones that are in the HMTL-spec are usually available in kotlinx.html as well (and thus can be auto-completed).

    A large part of this library is generated from the actual HTML spec.

    Claude Code seems to have not problem writing it (I barely write templates myself these days).

    https://github.com/kotlin/kotlinx.html

    https://dzone.com/articles/modern-type-safe-template-engines...

    by flossly
  • > Two years ago, I picked up Zig, and I’d never have imagined I’d be considering web development in such a low-level language.

    This is kind of funny remark, given that the author started in 2000 in Web development, and with PHP 3.0.

    I started in 1997, our distributed systems class had exercises to write CGIs in Perl and C.

    Between 1999 and 2001, most Web development at my employer was in Tcl and C, ASP was naturally a mix of VB and C++ COM components, and there was also the fun to write all those mod_something Apache extensions, and IIS ISAPI modules, naturally in C and C++.

    Ah, Microsoft was also shipping ATLServer, because who wouldn't want to use ATL for Web development, while Borland/Inprise was shipping similar stuff for Delphi and C++ Builder.

    PHP itself, in 3.0, it was still the time that it hardly had much functionality builtin, so it was quite common to write extension modules in C.

    So it is kind of ironic to read coming back to the way things were, before the slow scripting languages takevover in the 2010's, is something no one thought about.

    by pjmlp

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