liquid

The CEO of Shopify is filing PRs against their public repos: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056 (To be fair, he did build liquid and much of Shopify himself at the start of the company so he's not exactly inexperienced, but still.)

Tobi from Shopify used a variant of autoresearch to optimize the Liquid template engine, and found a 53% speedup after ~120 experiments: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056 I wrote up some more notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/13/liquid/

Seems the headline isn't accurate as it implied he is against liquid. May be better to use - Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations. -The autoresearch pattern; Is this like a brute force AI trial and error to performance improvement for agent? - 53% faster combined parse+render time, , 61% fewer object allocations[1] Surprisingly he got the fewer object allocation right, but it isn't 53% faster as it would implied 1.53x the speed. In reality it is 53% reduction ( or half ) in rendering time which is close to 2x faster. At the scale of Shopify, I wonder how much saving would make with a 2x faster rendering software. I am thinking if it would hit a million dollar per year. >With GC consuming 74% of total CPU time I guess there is still plenty of room for improvement. [1] https://github.com/Shopify/liqui

I see no reason to run my own benchmark here, the numbers aren't run through an LLM they're right there in the JSONL file: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/blob/3182b7c1b3758b0f5fe2d...

Getting a 53% performance boost on a 20+ year old codebase by running a bunch of experiments is pretty exciting to me: https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/pull/2056

Author of wasmex[1] here (an elixir package which allows runnung WASM). Next to the mentioned wasmtime, wasm3, and wamr, there is also wasmer[2] I would add to the list of capable WASM runtimes. The great things these runtimes offer are how easy they are to integrate into other programming languages environments. E.g. with wasmex you could easily run WASM from your elixir application (or with wasmer from ruby[3] or many other languages if you want). Imagine building shopify, but without needing to invent your own template language for customers to extend their shop-template[4]. They could provide a WASM extension API where shop-owners could let sandboxed WASM files render their shop. This would let allow shop-owners to write templates in their favorite language instead of e.g. liquid and still be secure. [1] https://github.com/tessi/wasme

I just want to make a note that Tobi (Shopify's CEO) has made great contributions to Rails open source ecosystem with projects like Liquid and ActiveMerchant, which he started: - https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/commits?author=tobi - https://github.com/activemerchant/active_merchant/commits?au... We leverage these projects daily, so it's awesome to see his company doing so well. In addition, we're on Shopify's platform as a app developer, so his company has added a lot of value, both commercially and non-commercially to developers, not just e-commerce merchants. Kudos to them.

If you just need formatting without logic, then you could use something like Markdown. Someone else already mentioned GRMustache [1], and that looks pretty good. I'm not sure if there is an iOS version, but you could look for something like liquid [2]. I think liquid is usually a better choice for user-controlled templates, especially when you're rendering on a server. But if they're just compiling the templates on their own device, then handlebars (GRMustache) would be the right way to go. [1] https://github.com/groue/GRMustache [2] https://github.com/Shopify/liquid