When comparing squirrelly vs Mustache.js, the Slant community recommends Mustache.js for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript templating engines?” Mustache.js is ranked 4th while squirrelly is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Mustache.js is:
Mustache provides you with a clean and easy to understand syntax. Having a syntax that is readable is always a huge plus, since this means easier maintenance and code readability in the future.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Blazing Fast
In most templating benchmarks, Squirrelly equals or outperforms the speed of other templating engines.
Pro Rich and customizable features
Squirrelly supports custom helpers, partials, and filters.
Pro Not language-bound
Squirrelly isn't tied to a specific language, like HTML. That means that you can use it to generate files of all kinds, from Markdown to JavaScript to SVGs.
Pro No whitespace worries
Squirrelly is not whitespace sensitive.
Pro Super simple
Squirrelly has syntax like Mustache or Swig, and you can write your first template in a few minutes! It also works with ExpressJS right out of the box.
Pro Clean syntax
Mustache provides you with a clean and easy to understand syntax. Having a syntax that is readable is always a huge plus, since this means easier maintenance and code readability in the future.
Pro Available in lots of languages
Available in a wide variety of languages including Ruby, JavaScript, Python, C++, Scala, Go, Julia, Swift and more. See the full list here.
Pro Lightweight
Mustache is easy to deliver. If you need more features down the road, you can switch to handlebars, which is a superset of Mustache.
Pro Logic-less
By design logic-less templates force you to separate concerns thus helping you avoid future problems with refactoring. It also allow templates to be used with multiple programming languages without changes.
Pro Server side support
Mustache.js has multi-language server side support, which essentially means you can use mustache based templates on languages other than javascript. (like if your server-side was built on Java you could still use Mustache.js)
Pro Popular
This would mean that you'll have a large community to help you out if you run into any problems.
Pro Can be compiled
Mustache templates can be compiled to JS files, so that they can be directly loaded.
Cons
Con Basic tasks are difficult
Mustache js's attempts at making some things simple makes them so easy that they're almost difficult. That is the case with some basic tasks like figuring out how to apply css to shade odd/even rows on your template based content.
Con Bested by Handlebars in many ways
Handlebars being an extension of Mustache bests it in both speed and power. It adds additional features to Mustache which make writing templates easier and faster.
Benchmarks have also shown that Precompiled Handlebars renders in about half the time of Mustache and the rewritten Handlebars (current version) is 5 to 7 times faster than Mustache.