from Hacker News

Show HN: Blades – fast static site generator written in Rust

by marosgrego on 10/12/20, 11:03 PM with 90 comments

  • by chrsstrm on 10/13/20, 4:14 AM

    I'm going to try this out at some point this week, but the one item that makes me pause: the sitemap. Hugo is fast, but it doesn't do incremental builds. Once you get to the point where you're publishing 10's of thousands of posts, Hugo starts to get real slow (like 20 minutes to build, even after enabling template caching), so an increase in speed during build time is welcome. But once you get to 50K posts you realize that Hugo doesn't follow Google's convention to break your sitemap into separate files with an index map[0]. Hugo doesn't have a handler for this and as of now I haven't figured out how to modify the sitemap compilation process to be compliant (not like I've tried too hard, I'm not native with Go and the code isn't clear to me where the sitemap is being built). If Blades would handle the sitemap issue for me without needing a plugin or modification, that would be huge for a lot of people on the Hugo community boards.

    [0] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

  • by cipherzero on 10/13/20, 4:41 AM

    This is neat! Good work. Was any of this inspired by Zola? https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overvi...

    I’ve used Zola and love the build speed and power that it has. My only real complaint is common mark as the markdown engine. I prefer the tera/jinja2-esque template syntax over ramhorn/mustache-esque that’s used here.

    I’ll have to try and port a theme to blades to give it a fair assessment.

  • by AnonC on 10/13/20, 6:54 AM

    It would be great if every new static site generator had a page that has comparisons with the ones that came before...at least for the ones in the same language and same deployment model (or dependencies). After going through this site, I was left wondering (as someone who hasn't used Rust based SSGs) what the differences are between Blades, Zola and Cobalt.

    The site says that it's a hobby project, but additional marketing with comparisons is always useful to get more eyes (and possibly more contributors too).

  • by forgotmypw17 on 10/13/20, 2:41 AM

    Nice work, thank you for sharing!

    Great job on the 386 theme.

    Documentation is understandable and easy to dive into.

    Great design, and rather complete feature-set.

    TOML looks like a great format, too.

  • by bacondude3 on 10/13/20, 3:41 AM

    All I want is a static site generator that sits in an executable file in my project's directory and doesn't require any dependencies so that I can run `./ssg build` and have all of my Markdown files interpolated into my template files and put in their own directory. I don't want to have to install all of the dependencies for Ruby or Hugo or Blades, cool as this project looks. Are there any SSGs that fill that niche?

    (A Python executable would be fine since pretty much every Linux computer has Python, but I don't want to have to deal with pip).

  • by higerordermap on 10/13/20, 1:53 PM

    Off topic:

    Any aggregated lists of sufficiently mature projects in "new" languages (rust, nim etc)?

    That would be helpful for people searching for some idiomatic code.

    Also to evaluate performance etc.. characteristics of the language.

  • by hendry on 10/13/20, 5:27 AM

    I wish for a static site generator with back links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aM3JzBJ6qo

  • by mhd on 10/13/20, 8:13 AM

    Another static-binary static-site generator I've recently discovered is Soupalt[1]. Which adds OCaml to the list of languages for that kind of thing, with extensibility via Lua. Has a a more unopinionated approach to thing, instead of just markdown expansion, it's also a generic HTML postprocessor.

    [1]: https://soupault.neocities.org/

  • by marosgrego on 10/13/20, 5:08 PM

    Blades author here. Just added it to AUR for more convenient install for people who are not Rust developers: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/blades-bin/

  • by woile on 10/13/20, 6:45 AM

    Hey super nice! I would add some more info to the docs: formats supported (md, rst?, etc), if it is also a blog generator I would include that info. Looks pretty awesome and simple, thanks for sharing!

  • by twarge on 10/13/20, 1:52 AM