Here’s the Deal

Haml vs ERB

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When comparing Haml vs ERB, the Slant community recommends ERB for most people. In the question“What are the best Ruby templating languages?” ERB is ranked 2nd while Haml is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose ERB is:

Since ERB is included with Ruby out of the box, there is no additional installation and setup required. The fact that it's included by default in Ruby, a lot of projects use it.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best Ruby templating languages?

Pros

Pro
Easy to learn

There are plenty of learning resources available for those who want to learn Haml. The documentation is detailed and well organized, and Haml is easy to pick up.

Pro
Efficient

By using indentation rather than closing tags and eliminating curly braces, Haml is fast to code.
For example
This:

<div id ="lower">
  <div class="right column">
    <div id="currentDate"><%= print_date %></div>
  </div>
</div>

Can be written as:

%div#lower
    %div.right.column
       %div#currentDate= print_date

Pro
Clean syntax

Haml's syntax is very clean and pleasant to look at. It doesn't use HTML tags and it's not verbose at all. The templates are easily readable.

Pro
Comes with Ruby

Since ERB is included with Ruby out of the box, there is no additional installation and setup required. The fact that it's included by default in Ruby, a lot of projects use it.

Pro
HTML with embedded Ruby

ERB is a way to embed Ruby into plain HTML, which means there is no need to learn a new syntax for HTML. This makes ERB fast to learn, and a great option to use on projects that have multiple developers/designers.

Pro
Familiar even for developers with no Ruby experience

ERB's interpolated tags are very familiar to developers who have worked with PHP, ASP or JSP, even though they may not have any prior experience with Ruby.

Pro
Maintained by Ruby on Rails developers

Due to Ruby on Rails (RoR) use of ERB, the developers of RoR will continue to maintain ERB, guaranteeing project health.

Pro
Best Performance

It has the best performance of all of ruby templates, although it wasn't designed for productivity as HAML or SLIM.

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Cons

Con
Bad Performance

The rendering time with haml is slower than its competitors.

Con
Whitespace sensitivity can be problematic

Haml uses indentation to define structure, rather than closing tags. Though this, in most cases, makes code more efficient to write, it can also cause problems.
Being off by one space can cause an error or change the structure of the code.