libsass

At Moovweb, we write a ton of Sass. You maybe haven’t heard of Sass if you aren’t a Rubyist or a Railser, but you’ve probably heard of one of its offspring if you do any front-end development. Sass is a “CSS precompiler language”. That’s a fancy way of saying that when you write some Sass, you’re really writing CSS. Sass converts into CSS. It’s meant to make writing CSS more powerful and more beautiful.

Because we use so much Sass, we end up with some really large projects. The current Sass engine can take a really long time to compile a project – sometimes up to 30s! This is a drag on development, so we set out to fix it.

Our very own Aaron “Compiler Ninja” Leung was set the task of porting thousands of lines of Ruby code (the language that the Sass compiler was written in) to C++ with a C interface.

After several months of really hard work, we’re proud to announce: libsass.

libsass is about 4000% faster than the original Sass library and is also able to be compiled into a ton of different languages. Already we have SassJS, SassRuby and SassGo! This opens Sass up to developers in hundreds of languages. It’s super easy to write a wrapper for libsass in your favorite language.

Moovweb is excited to see libsass a reality and is planning on supporting the development of libsass (and Sass in general) into the future.

Check out the projects on and feel free to contribute. This is open source after all!