liquidz

A Liquid template engine written in Zig.

Why

• 💎 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.

Usage

# Build
zig build

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

Language Bindings

Node.js

npm install liquidz

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

Browser

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

Bun

bun add liquidz

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

Deno

deno add npm:liquidz

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

Ruby

gem install liquidz

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

Elixir

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

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

Python

pip install liquidz

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

Testing

# 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

Benchmarks

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

Comprehensive Template

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

Command	Mean [ms]	Min [ms]	Max [ms]	Relative
Liquidz (Zig)	252.5 ± 81.0	204.0	529.8	1.00
Ruby Liquid	844.3 ± 52.7	797.3	978.8	3.34 ± 1.09

Liquidz is ~3.3x faster than Ruby Liquid.

Shopify Dawn Theme

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.

Template	Liquidz [ms]	Ruby [ms]	Speedup
card-collection.liquid	12.0 ± 1.1	186.7 ± 106.1	15.6x
facets.liquid	20.1 ± 1.1	171.7 ± 35.6	8.5x
price.liquid	37.4 ± 71.1	171.5 ± 40.9	4.6x

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

Running Benchmarks

# 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

License

MIT