Version: Next

How Squirrelly Works

Unlike many pieces of software, we like our users to understand what their programs are doing behind the scenes.

TL;DR

Squirrelly uses Regular Expressions to turn a template into a function which can be called with a specific set of options. Since all of the parsing is done beforehand, the function (called a "Precompiled" function) just does string interpolation and is incredibly fast.

Long Version:

  1. Squirrelly uses a big RegExp with inline tokenization to parse the template by looping through each valid tag (ex. {{...}}) in the template. It creates a simple syntax tree which it passes to compile
  2. During compilation, Squirrelly creates a function string from the syntax tree, then uses Function to bring it to life.
  3. This explanation is really lacking. Just read the source code :)
Last updated on by Ben Gubler