Comparison

The following is a general comparison between different engines. It'll be expanded and updated as time allows and new versions of the various engines become available.

Summary

Jinja2's statistics vs. Mako, say, indicate that while it doesn't have substantially more individual lines, those individual lines are far, far more complex individually (bytecode size scale difference), and that those lines are arranged with greater Mccabe complexity in the flow control structures. Both generally greater complexity, but also far more specific instances of excessive complexity, including a worst-case that's basically off the chart, despite having theoretically greater internal structure due to the # functions / classes distinction.

Though all evaluated engines except tenjin, which uses module compression techniques to merge multiple modules into one file, organize the code into modules with functionally similar purposes, cinje basically isn't comparable in terms of code density.

Some people just like to watch CPUs burn.

Methodology

Versions represented:

• cinje==1.1.0
• Jinja2==2.8
• Mako==1.0.4
• Tenjin==1.1.1

All tests are run against the pip installed code present in the site-packages directory. Tools utilized:

• SLoC, Estimated Effort: Generated using David A. Wheeler's sloccount-2.26
• Code Complexity: mccabe==0.4.0
• Execution Totals: coverage==4.0.3

Methodologies:

• Function Count: find "${PROJECT}" -iname \*.py -exec python -m dis {} \; | grep MAKE_FUNCTION | wc -l
• Class Count: find "${PROJECT}" -iname \*.py -exec python -m dis {} \; | grep BUILD_CLASS | wc -l
• Bytecode Size: Calculated after python -O2 -m compileall usage, based on real bytecode file size before block rounding.

Ancillary (sometimes optional, but installed) dependencies:

• MarkupSafe==0.23

Code Statistics

	cinje	Jinja2	Mako	Tenjin
Source Files	26	23	26	1
Source Lines of Code	1076	6438	5035	1366
SLoC Per File Average	41	280	194	1366
Number of Functions	36	282	164	39 [1]
Number of Classes	20	137	80	25 [1]
Average Complexity	2.755	2.962	2.578	3.131
Complexity 95th %	8	9	8	12
Maximum Complexity	19	38	22	23
# > 15 Complexity	1	8	4	1
Bytecode Size (Bytes)	42541	462830	197737	59891
Bytecode Size (KiB)	42 KiB	452 KiB	193 KiB	58 KiB

Template Rendering

Using full (non-streaming) generation of the 1000-row "bigtable" test, how many individual functions are called and how many times are they called?

	cinje	Jinja2	Mako	Tenjin
Distinct Functions	18	27	37	16
Function Calls	84011	60020	93036	123012

Note 1: Tenjin "cheats" by bundling multiple dynamically constructed modules within itself; these numbers are not accurate to the actual accessible and/or executed code during runtime.