django-templates-cythonized

Cython-accelerated drop-in replacement for Django's template engine. 3-14x faster depending on template complexity.

This is a benchmarking tool to evaluate what a Cython-level template speedup would bring to your project. Not meant for production use. Feel free to try though. If you run into issues, open an issue and I'll see if I can help.

Benchmarks

Measured on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, Python 3.14t (free-threaded).

Benchmark	Cythonized	Stock Django	Speedup
1000-book table (for/if/cycle/filters)	2.4 ms	33.7 ms	14x
50-book table + per-book forms (4 widgets/row)	6.1 ms	21.3 ms	3.5x

Usage

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "BACKEND": "django_templates_cythonized.backend.CythonizedTemplates",
        "DIRS": [BASE_DIR / "templates"],
        "APP_DIRS": True,
        "OPTIONS": {
            "context_processors": [
                "django.template.context_processors.debug",
                "django.template.context_processors.request",
                "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
                "django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages",
            ],
        },
    }
]

For form-heavy templates, also set the form renderer:

FORM_RENDERER = "django_templates_cythonized.backend.CythonizedFormRenderer"

Development

git clone https://github.com/oliverhaas/django-templates-cythonized.git
cd django-templates-cythonized
uv sync --group dev
uv pip install -e .          # Build Cython extensions
uv run pytest                # Run tests
uv run pytest tests/benchmarks/ -v --no-cov -p no:codspeed  # Run benchmarks

Re-run uv pip install -e . after modifying .py files to recompile.

Attribution & License

Contains modified copies of Django's template source code. BSD-3-Clause (matching Django). Benchmark structure inspired by django-rusty-templates.