liquidz

A Liquid template engine written in Zig.

• 💎 Ruby-only limitation: Shopify maintains Liquid only in Ruby since they can assume a Ruby runtime on their servers and developers' machines. The rest of us aren't so lucky.
• 🎯 Universal reach: A systems language like Zig lets us target every platform: standalone binaries, WebAssembly, and libraries that any runtime can include via foreign function interfaces.
• 🔧 One implementation to rule them all: Instead of maintaining separate Liquid parsers for each platform or language, we maintain one battle-tested implementation and build bindings for the rest.

# Build
zig build

# Render template
./zig-out/bin/liquidz template.liquid '{"name": "World"}'

npm install liquidz

import { render } from 'liquidz';
console.log(render('Hello, {{ name }}!', { name: 'World' }));

import { init, render } from 'https://unpkg.com/liquidz/browser.mjs';
await init();
console.log(render('Hello, {{ name }}!', { name: 'World' }));

bun add liquidz

import { render } from 'liquidz';
console.log(render('Hello, {{ name }}!', { name: 'World' }));

deno add npm:liquidz

import { render } from 'liquidz';
console.log(render('Hello, {{ name }}!', { name: 'World' }));

gem install liquidz

require 'liquidz_ext'
puts Liquidz.render("Hello, {{ name }}!", { name: "World" })

# mix.exs
{:liquidz, "~> 0.5"}

Liquidz.render!("Hello, {{ name }}!", %{name: "World"})

pip install liquidz

from liquidz import render
print(render("Hello, {{ name }}!", {"name": "World"}))

# Unit tests
zig build test

# Golden Liquid tests
cd test && ruby run_golden_tests.rb

# Liquid Spec tests
cd test && ruby run_liquid_spec_tests.rb

Liquidz is significantly faster than Ruby Liquid. Benchmarks are measured using hyperfine with 1000 render iterations per run.

A comprehensive template that exercises all major Liquid tags and filters against realistic e-commerce data:

Liquidz is ~3.3x faster than Ruby Liquid.

We also benchmark against real-world templates from Shopify's Dawn theme. Out of 92 templates, 28 work with Liquidz. The remaining templates use Shopify-specific extensions like {% form %}, {% schema %}, and Ruby-style method calls (product.gift_card?) that are not part of standard Liquid.

On Dawn templates, Liquidz is 5-15x faster than Ruby Liquid.

# Quick benchmark (single template)
./benchmark/run.sh benchmark/templates/comprehensive.liquid 1000

# With hyperfine for statistical rigor
./benchmark/run.sh benchmark/templates/comprehensive.liquid 1000 --hyperfine

# Benchmark all Dawn theme templates
./benchmark/run.sh

The benchmark infrastructure is in the benchmark/ directory. It includes:

• bench.zig - Zig benchmark runner
• ruby_bench.rb - Ruby benchmark runner for comparison
• run.sh - Wrapper script for running comparisons
• templates/comprehensive.liquid - Comprehensive template using all features
• themes/dawn/ - Shopify Dawn theme templates
• shopify_mock_data.json - Realistic e-commerce data

MIT