Re: My Review of mustache starts today.

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-02-19 17:27:12

Jeff Garland wrote:
> Just wanted to comment on this here, since boostache was a library in a week
> invention. The most important innovation in boostache in my view was the
> fact that it did not require conversion of a data structure into a map-like data
> structure prior to output.  The classic Google template (a mustache engine
> from years ago) and most others I'd ever seen required this step.
> Unfortunately, I didn't have time to look at boost::mustache in detail, but from
> my quick look it appears the use of Describe also enables this direct to format
> feature.

As is, the proposed Mustache library does take any "reasonable" UDT as the
input data. so purely from the user point of view it "works", but
implementation-wise, this is accomplished by converting the UDT into a
json::value using boost::json::value_from.

This isn't efficient, but fixing that is nontrivial and has repercussions on
the rest of the library, including future extensions such as the aforementioned
filters.

(Not caring about copies makes the design much more flexible, e.g. the
user-supplied filter functions can just take and return json::value, without
ever knowing about UDTs.)