Why not use Mustache or another templating library?

Mustache is a fine templating library and liked by a lot of people. However I see these drawbacks:

• 600 lines of code, 9 contributors for 20 line code problem - it’s therefore difficult to understand completely.

• All data is automatically escaped for special characters in HTML.

  • In mustache programmers need to learn from the school of hard knocks to always use {{{ }}} syntax for tokens - otherwise user data with these special characters can break the application.

    • It’s much better to follow the safe by design principle.

  • It’s not bad compared to some templating frameworks but having conditional if/not support is starting down the path of building a bad language.

• It has no unnecessary features like

  • Template caching - which exchanges speed for memory usage and adds complexity. This is premature optimization. The simpler library will be faster by design.

  • There are no fancy callback features to tempt developers to write complicated code. It’s only going to work with an array of data.

  • No if statements if data isn’t present - encouraging separation of concerns.