Hugo, Compiled Languages From The Perspective of Permacomputing

After getting rid of Gatsby and React, I ended up deciding on using Hugo to build this site, partly inspired by coming across the blog of the creator of Lean Web Club and ReefJS, and seeing that they use Hugo, as well as other factors.

Using Hugo, the build time for my website is 97ms, vs with Gatsby it was 50 seconds. This is a great difference and makes adding content to the site feel much lighter.

@decentral1ze@varia.zone wrote a beautiful assessment of the go programming language from a permacomputing perspective for permacomputing.net, highlighting some of the positives and negatives.

In my case, I can see how a Gatsby build time of 50 seconds might incentivize me to get a faster and more modern computer in order to improve this, but that with Hugo, clearly my computer could even be slower than it is, and it would be fine. In this light, I think building things in compiled languages so that they can be more resource efficient can be seen as a permacomputing practice,
although as always there are different tradeoffs and contexts to consider.

Lastly, after changing the tools this site was built with, I also re-organized the content, inspired largely by Laurel Schwulst's metaphor of notebooks in "writing & worlding". You can read more about the organization of this site here.

Let's see in 10 years if the Hugo build is as broken as my Gatsby site was, or if this new set up fares better.

☽