[ratorx]

I find it interesting that they bought Astro (https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/), which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next. A month ago.

If it is so cheap to make something that they recommend using (rather than a proof of concept), why buy Astro (presumably it was more expensive than the token cost of this clone?).

One conclusion is that, at the organisational level, it still makes sense to hire the “vision” behind the framework, rather than just clone it. Alternatively, maybe AI has improved that much in 1 month!

[pier25]

Unlike Astro, this looks more like a low effort experiment while making fun of a competitor than a project intended for any serious production use.

Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see what happens a couple of years from now.

[fantasizr]

I'm very patient with the ai-led porting projects since they're revealed with a big engagement splash on social media. Could it be durable? sure but I doubt anyone is in that much of a rush to migrate to a project built in a week either.

[chrisweekly]

I view it as a long-overdue exit ramp for maintainers of Next.js-based webapps to extricate themselves from its overly-opinionated and unnecessarily-tightly-coupled build tooling. Being stuck on webpack/rspack and unable to leverage vite has been a huge downside to Next.js. It's a symptom of Vercel's economic incentives. This project fixes it in one fell swoop. I predict it hurts Vercel but saves Next.js.

[3rodents]

Astro is a different paradigm. Acquiring Astro gives Cloudflare influence over a very valuable class of website, in the same way Vercel has over a different class from their ownership of Next.js. Astro is a much better fit for Cloudflare. Next.js is very popular and god awful to run outside of Vercel, Cloudflare aren’t creating a better next.js, they’re just trying to make it so their customers can move Next.js websites from Vercel to Cloudflare. Realistically, anyone moving their next.js site to Cloudflare is going to end up migrating to Astro eventually.

[thierrydamiba]

Can you talk more about this? What’s wrong with cloudflare pages plus Nextjs? Why do you need Astro?

Thanks

[willio58]

Astro isn’t solving the same surface as next. Astro is great for static sites with some dynamic behavior. The same could be said about next depending on how you write your code, but next can also be used for highly dynamic websites. Using Astro for highly dynamic websites is like jamming a square peg into a round hole.

We use Astro for our internal dev documentation/design system and it’s awesome for that.

[paulddraper]

But presumably if you could do this for Next it would be at least as easy for Astro?

[ricardobeat]

Astro is not a static site builder.

[bastardoperator]

I think they just want steer users/developers to CF products, maybe not? It is interesting to see the two platforms. I've moved to svelte, never been a frontend person either but kind of enjoying it actually.

[satvikpendem]

> which from my definitely-not-a-frontend-person perspective seems to tackle a similar problem to Next.

It does not. Astro is more for static sites not dynamic web apps.

[pier25]

That used to be the case 3-4 years ago. Today Astro is very much a serious contender for dynamic web apps.

[satvikpendem]

I tried it about 6 months ago for something I had to redo in NextJS afterwards, it is really not built for those sorts of web apps, even today.

[pier25]

What features are missing?

[input_sh]

Astro has "server islands" which rely on a backend server running somewhere. If 90% of the page is static but you need some interactivity for the remaining 10%, then Astro is a good fit, as that's what makes it different than other purely static site generators. Unlike Next.js, it's also not tied to React but framework-agnostic.

Anyways, that's why it's a good fit for Cloudflare: that backend needs to be run somewhere and Astro is big enough to have some sort of a userbase behind them that Cloudflare can advertise its service to. Think of it more as a targeted ad than a real acquisition because they're super interested in the technology behind it. If that were the case, they could've just forked it instead of acquiring it.

From Astro's perspective, they're (presumably) getting more money than they ever did working on a completely open source tool with zero paywalls, so it's a win-win for both sides that Cloudflare couldn't get from their vibe-coded project nobody's using at the moment.

[selridge]

You buy that concern to hire the people. The stack is already free.