Thoughts on agile software development
This article on performance was not actually intended to be a multi-part article. But if you take a closer look at your own code through performance glasses, you will quickly discover further bottlenecks. In this case, it’s an unclean modeling that FreshMarker has been carrying around since its early days. This article is about how this affects the performance of the template engine.
In addition to the expressiveness of the template, the number of supported data types and functions and the expandability, performance is a decisive criterion for a template engine. FreshMarker only evaluates the template output at runtime, so although the template engine is very flexible, it cannot compete with those that evaluate the templates at compile time. For historical reasons, FreshMarker also has no upfront type information about the data used, so some optimization options are not available.
A fundamental assumption of software developers is that the system libraries are error-free and perform well. Every now and then you are taught better, but after a while the memories fade and you hang on to the original misconceptions.