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by mikeatlas 3196 days ago
Is static page generation performance really a thing for you?
4 comments

here's the thing - i think the definition of fast is in two different dimensions and both of them count.

One is the generation: i actually run my startup's website on Hugo. There are quite a few pages - including landing pages - and jekll was sloooow.

Second, we have marketing people on windows + mac, dev people on linux. The time taken for someone to setup Hugo on their laptops is 5 minutes: its a single binary.

Jekyll - upwards of 30 minutes after fighting ruby and setting %PATH% variables in windows.

Faster page generation makes novel use cases like generating websites to be stored in cloud object storage with function calls actually possible and potentially much cheaper than a CMS like Wordpress. I'm sure there's some CMS POCs out there like that but the landscape is so chock full of plugins and really nontechnical users I can't really see it taking off.
It is really nice to be able to see your changes reflected "instantly" rather than having to "wait for a compile". Iteration is great!
Time to install is much faster, bundle install is just so damn slow.

And now that I'm not a ruby dev any more, I don't install a modern ruby on my computer.