Rust template engine benchmarks

This repo tries to assess Rust template engine performance. Following the download ratings from crates.io, these nine projects are assessed:

• write!: the std library write! macro
• Handlebars: Handlebars templating implemented in Rust
• Tera: template engine based on Jinja2/Django templates
• Liquid: the liquid templating language for Rust
• Askama: type-safe, compiled Jinja-like templates for Rust
• horrorshow: a templating library written in rust macros
• ructe: Rust Compiled Templates, efficient type-safe web page templates
• fomat: alternative syntax for print/write/format-like macros with a small templating language
• markup: A blazing fast, type-safe template engine for Rust.
• maud: A Compile-time HTML template engine for Rust.
• sailfish: Simple, small, and extremely fast template engine for Rust

Results

These results are from 2023-3-11 (rustc 1.68.0), running on an MacBook Pro 16 (2021) M1 Pro CPU. Your mileage may vary.

As a violin plot generated by Criterion:

Numbers, as output by Criterion:

Big table/Askama        time:   [330.10 µs 330.50 µs 330.95 µs]
Big table/fomat         time:   [226.79 µs 227.74 µs 228.66 µs]
Big table/Handlebars    time:   [3.6592 ms 3.6656 ms 3.6717 ms]
Big table/Horrorshow    time:   [166.35 µs 167.28 µs 168.16 µs]
Big table/Liquid        time:   [4.3793 ms 4.3828 ms 4.3864 ms]
Big table/Markup        time:   [54.963 µs 55.928 µs 56.784 µs]
Big table/Maud          time:   [71.931 µs 72.305 µs 72.697 µs]
Big table/Ructe         time:   [205.25 µs 205.70 µs 206.13 µs]
Big table/Sailfish      time:   [17.695 µs 17.711 µs 17.729 µs]
Big table/Tera          time:   [856.34 µs 857.40 µs 858.65 µs]
Big table/write         time:   [249.80 µs 250.29 µs 250.76 µs]

Teams/Askama            time:   [527.14 ns 527.87 ns 528.64 ns]
Teams/fomat             time:   [345.85 ns 346.65 ns 347.67 ns]
Teams/Handlebars        time:   [3.4753 µs 3.4808 µs 3.4860 µs]
Teams/Horrorshow        time:   [304.40 ns 305.30 ns 306.29 ns]
Teams/Liquid            time:   [4.3580 µs 4.3630 µs 4.3678 µs]
Teams/Markup            time:   [133.69 ns 134.39 ns 135.14 ns]
Teams/Maud              time:   [124.09 ns 124.53 ns 125.07 ns]
Teams/Ructe             time:   [461.57 ns 462.53 ns 463.52 ns]
Teams/Sailfish          time:   [89.921 ns 90.015 ns 90.100 ns]
Teams/Tera              time:   [3.0020 µs 3.0062 µs 3.0105 µs]
Teams/write             time:   [478.97 ns 480.01 ns 481.01 ns]

Running the benchmarks

$ cargo bench

Plots will be rendered if gnuplot is installed and will be available in the target/criterion folder.