Ego templating library

[yemzz]

Hi again! I hope this is my last question so that I won't bother you anymore.

I do not understand what is the purpose of ego templating library in the context of the app. What is the advantage that it provides? Is there a reason for not choosing an implementation w/o ego?

[benbjohnson]

hey again! Great question. There are lots of templating implementations and Go even includes one in its standard library (html/template). There are several things I dislike about most templating libraries (including Go's):

1. They are evaluated at runtime so you don't get the benefit of type checking.
2. They have to be embedded into your application. This is easier with Go 1.16 since it includes file embedding.
3. It's a whole new language to learn on top of Go.

The ego templating library is modeled after the ERb template library from Ruby and it's a really thin layer over the Go language. It transpiles .ego files to .go files at compile time so that you end up with templates that are pure Go. That makes them extremely fast, automatically embedded, and provides all of Go's type checking capabilities (since they're just Go files).

There's even a nifty trick where ego embeds //go:line commands to show correct line numbers in Go errors.

[yemzz]

Thank you for your time. This is all super insightful to me. Related question to html package in the app.

prev := current - 1
if prev <= 0 {
  prev = 1
}
 
next := current + 1
if next >= pageN {
  next = pageN
}

In Pagination's Render method you do not use prev or next after this code. Is it intentional?

[benbjohnson]

Good catch. That's just a mistake on my end. 👍