Benchmarks

All benchmarks run on Mac Studio M1 Max, Bun 1.3.5.

Two Rendering Modes

Runtime Mode

render() - Best for development and templates with dynamic inheritance. 2-4x faster than Nunjucks.

AOT Mode

compile() - Pre-compile templates to JavaScript functions. 160x faster than Nunjucks.

Runtime Performance vs Nunjucks

Benchmark	binja	Nunjucks	Speedup
Simple Template	371K ops/s	96K ops/s	3.9x
Complex Template	44K ops/s	23K ops/s	2.0x
Multiple Filters	246K ops/s	63K ops/s	3.9x
Nested Loops	76K ops/s	26K ops/s	3.0x
Conditionals	84K ops/s	25K ops/s	3.4x
HTML Escaping	985K ops/s	242K ops/s	4.1x
Large Dataset	9.6K ops/s	6.6K ops/s	1.5x

AOT Compilation Performance

AOT compilation provides massive speedups by pre-compiling templates to optimized JavaScript functions:

Benchmark	binja AOT	binja Runtime	Speedup
Simple Template	14.3M ops/s	371K ops/s	39x
Complex Template	1.07M ops/s	44K ops/s	24x
Nested Loops	1.75M ops/s	76K ops/s	23x

vs Nunjucks

Benchmark	binja AOT	Nunjucks	Speedup
Simple Template	14.3M ops/s	96K ops/s	160x
Complex Template	1.07M ops/s	23K ops/s	46x

Why binja is Faster

1. Pure TypeScript for Bun

binja is built from scratch in TypeScript, optimized specifically for the Bun runtime. No legacy code or Node.js compatibility layers.

2. Inline Filter Optimization

~70 common filters have inline implementations to avoid function call overhead:

// Instead of:
filters['upper'](value)

// binja does:
value.toUpperCase()

This provides 10-15% speedup on filter-heavy templates.

3. AOT Compilation

Pre-compiling templates eliminates:

Lexing overhead
Parsing overhead
AST traversal
Filter lookup

// Compile once at startup
const template = compile('<h1>{{ title|upper }}</h1>')

// Renders in microseconds
const html = template({ title: 'hello' })

4. Efficient AST Representation

binja’s AST is optimized for fast traversal and minimal memory allocation.

Running Benchmarks

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/egeominotti/binja.git
cd binja

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Run benchmarks
bun run benchmark

Production Recommendations

Use AOT in Production - compile() for static templates
Pre-compile at Startup - Compile templates once, use many times
Enable Caching - Use cache: true in Environment
Monitor Cache - Use env.cacheStats() to optimize cacheMaxSize

import { compile } from 'binja'

// Best practice: compile at startup
const templates = {
  home: compile(await Bun.file('./views/home.html').text()),
  user: compile(await Bun.file('./views/user.html').text()),
}

// Sync rendering, extremely fast
app.get('/', () => templates.home({ title: 'Home' }))