// the find
goofychris/art-template
High performance JavaScript templating engine
art-template is a JavaScript templating engine that compiles templates to optimized functions using scope pre-declaration, making it genuinely fast compared to EJS, Handlebars, and Mustache. It runs in both Node.js and the browser, integrates with Express/Koa, and supports template inheritance. This is a mature library for server-side rendering or embedded browser templating where you want something lighter than a full frontend framework.
1. The compilation approach is sound — templates become plain JS functions with pre-declared scope variables, which is why it beats interpreted engines in benchmarks. 2. Template inheritance with named blocks is first-class, not bolted on — nested layout override works correctly. 3. Error reporting pinpoints the exact template line, not the compiled output line — that's non-trivial to implement and genuinely useful. 4. Two syntax modes (art syntax and native JS) let teams pick based on familiarity without maintaining two engines.
1. Last meaningful commit was years ago; the repo is effectively unmaintained — open issues sit with no response, and the Travis CI badge is dead since Travis deprecated the free tier. 2. The TypeScript definitions in index.d.ts are minimal and were clearly an afterthought — you will hit any() boundaries quickly in a typed project. 3. The benchmark comparisons on the README are stale; modern EJS and Pug have caught up significantly, and the claimed performance lead is no longer as dramatic. 4. No async/streaming support — rendering blocks the event loop for large templates, which matters if you are using this in a high-throughput Node server.