Type-safe HTML templating in Zig (lalinsky.com)

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.

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...

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

Looking forward to seeing some benchmarks!

i.e. MyTemplate.tpl.html

    {if $foo}hello world, {$myname}!{else}goodbye, world.{/if}

    MyTemplate(
      foo = true,
      myname = "bar"
    ).toString()

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.

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.

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

Is there maybe a Zig wrapper for Google soy around?

    me% cat index.m4
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <title>Better user history</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="local.css">
      </head>

      <body>
          <h3>Users</h3>
          <ul>
            <li><em>By username</em></li>
            <ul>
    sinclude(`byuser.m4')dnl
            </ul>
            <li><em>By last login date</em></li>
            <ul>
    sinclude(`bydate.m4')dnl
            </ul>
          </ul>
    sinclude(`footer.m4')dnl
      </body>
    </html>

    me% cat byuser.m4
    <li><a href="byuser/A-L">A-L</a></li>
    <li><a href="byuser/M-Z">M-Z</a></li>

    me% cat bydate.m4
    <li><a href="bydate/2025">2025</a></li>
    <li><a href="bydate/2026">2026</a></li>

    me% cat footer.m4
    <p><em>Last update: syscmd(`date | tr -d "\n"')</em>

    me% m4 index.m4 > index.htm

    me% cat index.htm
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head>
        <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
        <title>Better user history</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="local.css">
      </head>

      <body>
          <h3>Users</h3>
          <ul>
            <li><em>By username</em></li>
            <ul>
    <li><a href="byuser/A-L">A-L</a></li>
    <li><a href="byuser/M-Z">M-Z</a></li>
            </ul>
            <li><em>By last login date</em></li>
            <ul>
    <li><a href="bydate/2025">2025</a></li>
    <li><a href="bydate/2026">2026</a></li>
            </ul>
          </ul>
    <p><em>Last update: Mon Oct 12 03:08:32 EDT 2026</em>
      </body>
    </html>

1. https://ziggit.dev/t/making-it-harder-to-swallow-error-cance...

   #[component]
   pub fn HomePage(user: Option<User>) -> Element {
      rsx! {
         Layout { 
            title: "Home",
            if let Some(u) = user {
               h1 { "Welcome back, {u.name}!" }
               a { href: "/users/{u.id}", "Your profile" }
            } else {
               h1 { "Welcome, guest!" }
               a { href: "/login", "Log in" }
            }
         }
      }
   }