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}

    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.

Thank you for the article. I remember using Google Soy templates roughly 10 years ago. I think this is similar to what is used now when you make Helm templates for example or Go Templates. It has the html escaping, JavaScript escaping etc built in.

Is there maybe a Zig wrapper for Google soy around?

> 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.

W3C: Why can't we just have <includes src="./header.html"> and be done with it?

I love the idea! I could imagine something similar created for other languages too. Perhaps written in a way that a template could be reused in, let's say Django, and a JS React frontend. With all the type-safety that tsx provides.

The linked thread here[1] is… illuminating. The Zig stdlib seems pretty buggy, and the much applauded IO interfaces seem to be struggling with cancellation. The BDFL doesn’t seem to have much to say other than “brush your teeth”

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

sounds very similar to jte.gg for Java

I've never quite got the deal with 'template engines'. I have always just done normal programming - in whatever language I'm using - and interspersed outputting raw string literals to create the html.

If you can suppress your gag reflex, M4 can do some of what you want. sinclude(...) will include a file and be silent in case of failure. I did something like this for user-login history because I couldn't use PHP or Perl:

    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>

one thing i love about rust's macros is that you can accomplish this without needing a separate file type or inventing syntax

   #[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" }
            }
         }
      }
   }