My site sccl.cc was originally on Astro.
Astro is a cool thing. For quickly whipping up something nice it’s fine, but over time it started pissing me off:
Heavy runtime. To build a site you need Node.js, npm, node_modules at a hundred megabytes. For some static pages.
Complexity. Astro does everything: islands, ssr, endpoints, middleware. And I have a site with three pages: contacts, projects, peripherals - I don’t need much.
Alternatives?
I stumbled upon Zine.
Zine is an SSG in Zig. One binary, no dependencies.
Templates use SuperHTML - it’s valid html with templating added. No {{ }}, no Pug/Jade. Just html with attributes like :text, :if, :loop.
Content uses SuperMD - extended .md without needing to drop into html.
Migration process
Overall the migration was pretty simple - rewrite layouts from Astro to SuperHTML, port over existing scripts. The most tedious part is that astro uses its fucking .astro files with their weird mix of js and html, while SuperHTML is just html with extras.
Benefits?
Speed. Build in milliseconds instead of seconds.
Simplicity. No node_modules. No package-lock.json. No hundreds of dependencies. One binary, a content folder, a templates folder.
Control. I know every line of generated HTML. No hidden JS that Astro adds by default.
Downsides?
Zine is in beta.
Documentation is sparse in places. Community is small. If something breaks - you’re the first to notice.
But for a personal site it’s great.
One binary, a couple .smd files, one layout, and done.
How I ended up deploying this thing is described in How-to-ZINE-on-CF.md.