Static Site Generators: A Field Note

Running multiple sites across Hugo, a custom Node build system called Flatpack, and now a Go build system called Fastpack produces some clarity about what actually matters in a publishing toolchain.

Speed matters less than you think at moderate scale. Hugo is faster than anything else and it does not matter because the build is not the bottleneck — writing is. A build that takes three seconds versus thirty milliseconds affects nothing about the publication schedule.

What does matter: dependency stability. Hugo is a single binary. It does not break when npm has a bad day. It does not accumulate vulnerability warnings. It does not require a lock file that gets out of sync with the package manifest. The operational silence of a Hugo setup over three years is something you do not appreciate until you have managed Node-based tooling over the same period.

Fastpack gets most of the way there. Pure Go, zero external dependencies, go run main.go and done. The one place it does not match Hugo is template power — Go's html/template is capable but Hugo's template functions are richer. For simple publishing this does not matter. For complex layouts it would.

The lesson is that the right tool is the one you can leave alone for six months and return to without incident.