December 15, 2025
When templates spark a language war
Liquid-rust: Liquid templating for Rust
Rust takes on Jekyll as fans cheer speed while skeptics roast the syntax
TLDR: Liquid-rust brings Shopify-style templates to Rust and powers static site tools, aiming for speed and flexibility. Comments erupted: fans want a Jekyll-killer for iPhones, skeptics prefer Sailfish’s “just write Rust,” others roast Liquid’s syntax and demand benchmarks—showing a real appetite for faster, customizable site building.
Rust just got its own take on the popular Liquid template language, and the comment section instantly turned into a reality show. Liquid-rust promises to match Shopify’s Liquid rules while letting you pick and mix features, and it powers tools like cobalt static sites and cargo template generators. Translation: it’s a way to turn placeholders into webpages fast, with options to add your own “filters” (mini functions), tags, and blocks for custom behavior.
Speed demons showed up first. One user swore this could replace Ruby-based Jekyll on GitHub Pages because Jekyll crawls on iPhones without JIT (a speed boost Apple doesn’t allow), crowning Rust the new site-builder king. Then the plot twist: fans of Sailfish argued templates should just run real Rust code, not a special syntax—no new language to learn, just pure power.
Meanwhile, the peanut gallery heckled the Liquid style: “pipes” and “endif”? Hard pass. Another asked for hard numbers—ops per second—before joining the hype, while someone misread the name and thought this was the math-heavy “Liquid Haskell,” sparking light meme energy. Devs loved the plug-and-play vibe (filters, tags, blocks), with one excited to wire it into an AI project. Verdict: promising tool, spicy split. Stay tuned.
Key Points
- •Liquid-rust is a Rust implementation of the Liquid templating language.
- •Project goals are conformance with Shopify Liquid, flexibility for variants, and performance.
- •It is used by tools such as cobalt, cargo-tarball, cargo-generate, and Mandy.
- •Integration involves adding the liquid crate and using ParserBuilder (e.g., with_stdlib) to parse and render templates.
- •Developers can create and register custom filters, tags, and blocks; the project is dual-licensed under Apache 2.0 and MIT.