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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. Templating Languages And Extensions
  5. Pug vs Slim Lang

Pug vs Slim Lang

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pug
Pug
Stacks1.3K
Followers1.2K
Votes467
Slim Lang
Slim Lang
Stacks65
Followers57
Votes50
GitHub Stars5.4K
Forks499

Pug vs Slim Lang: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In the realm of web development, there are various templating languages used to simplify the process of creating dynamic web pages. Two popular choices are Pug and Slim Lang. While both serve a similar purpose, there are distinct differences between the two that make them unique in their own ways.

1. **Syntax**: Pug uses significant whitespace and indentation to determine the structure of the document, resembling Python-like syntax. On the other hand, Slim Lang employs a minimalistic syntax with fewer characters and special symbols, making it cleaner and more concise in nature.

2. **Line Breaks**: Pug automatically adds line breaks and rearranges the code to maintain a clean and organized structure. In contrast, Slim Lang requires explicit line breaks and indentation to separate elements, giving developers more control over the layout of their code.

3. **Extensions**: Pug offers various programming constructs and features such as variables, conditionals, and loops, making it a versatile choice for complex projects. Slim Lang, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity and minimalism, limiting the number of features available for developers.

4. **HTML Output**: Pug generates HTML code that closely reflects the structure of the Pug template, including the use of semantic elements and indentation. Slim Lang, however, translates its concise syntax directly into HTML without preserving the original formatting, resulting in more compact output.

5. **Community Support**: Pug has a larger and more established community of developers, providing extensive documentation, tutorials, and plugins for users to enhance their projects. Slim Lang, while less popular, has a dedicated following that appreciates its streamlined approach to templating.

6. **Integration**: Pug can be seamlessly integrated with popular JavaScript frameworks like Node.js and Express, offering a unified ecosystem for server-side rendering. On the other hand, Slim Lang is often used in Ruby on Rails applications, leveraging the strengths of the Ruby programming language for web development.

In Summary, Pug and Slim Lang differ in syntax, line breaks, extensions, HTML output, community support, and integration, each offering unique advantages for developers based on their preferences and project requirements.

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Detailed Comparison

Pug
Pug
Slim Lang
Slim Lang

This project was formerly known as "Jade." Pug is a high performance template engine heavily influenced by Haml and implemented with JavaScript for Node.js and browsers.

Slim is a template language whose goal is to reduce the view syntax to the essential parts without becoming cryptic. It started as an exercise to see how much could be removed from a standard html template (<, >, closing tags, etc...). As more people took an interest in Slim, the functionality grew and so did the flexibility of the syntax.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
5.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
499
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
65
Followers
1.2K
Followers
57
Votes
467
Votes
50
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 138
    Elegant html
  • 90
    Great with nodejs
  • 59
    Open source
  • 59
    Very short syntax
  • 54
    Structured with indentation
Pros
  • 13
    Easier to type and maintain than haml
  • 12
    Very clean and logical
  • 9
    Integrates with Rails by installing a single gem
  • 8
    Performs better than haml
  • 4
    Concise
Cons
  • 2
    Not so good editor support
  • 1
    Lots of syntactic corner cases
  • 1
    Overcomplicated syntax
  • 1
    Easy to break nesting when reindenting or copy-pasting
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Pug, Slim Lang?

TypeScript

TypeScript

TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. It's a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Handlebars.js

Handlebars.js

Handlebars.js is an extension to the Mustache templating language created by Chris Wanstrath. Handlebars.js and Mustache are both logicless templating languages that keep the view and the code separated like we all know they should be.

Mustache

Mustache

Mustache is a logic-less template syntax. It can be used for HTML, config files, source code - anything. It works by expanding tags in a template using values provided in a hash or object. We call it "logic-less" because there are no if statements, else clauses, or for loops. Instead there are only tags. Some tags are replaced with a value, some nothing, and others a series of values.

RactiveJS

RactiveJS

Ractive was originally created at theguardian.com to produce news applications. Ractive takes your Mustache templates and transforms them into a lightweight representation of the DOM – then when your data changes, it intelligently updates the real DOM.

EJS

EJS

It is a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript. No religiousness about how to organize things. No reinvention of iteration and control-flow. It's just plain JavaScript.

Jinja

Jinja

It is a full featured template engine for Python. It has full unicode support, an optional integrated sandboxed execution environment, widely used and BSD licensed.

Twig

Twig

It is a modern template engine for PHP. It is flexible, fast, and secure. Its syntax originates from Jinja and Django templates.

Nunjucks

Nunjucks

Rich Powerful language with block inheritance, autoescaping, macros, asynchronous control, and more. Heavily inspired by jinja2. It supports all modern browsers.

Hogan.js

Hogan.js

Hogan.js is a 3.4k JS templating engine developed at Twitter. Use it as a part of your asset packager to compile templates ahead of time or include it in your browser to handle dynamic templates.

Jsonnet

Jsonnet

It is a data templating language for app and tool developers. It is a powerful DSL for elegant description of JSON data.

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