Is there any particular reason micro.blog sites are built on Hugo? Of all the popular static site generators, I think it’s probably the most obtuse. The only reason I can think of is how quickly it builds sites.

@leonp I’m genuinely curious about this too, as although I’m a complete newb at Go templates, when I look at Jekyll code and compare it to Hugo the latter looks like a hot mess.

@pimoore I’m really used to Jekyll, so probably biased, but like Florens says, it’s the template order and range of concepts that’s confusing. It feels closer to Go than Jekyll does to Ruby, even in its . mania. Jekyll uses Liquid for templates, which is well documented.

@leonp If this comes down to a speed issue of Hugo building sites faster, did Jekyll not have faster compiling as part of the 4.0 rollout?

@pimoore I think all template systems like the one Hugo or Jekyll have are equally terrible with their own even worse limits

I have used both Hugo and Jekyll a lot, over the years and Hugo is much easier to deal with in the long term. Every time I’ve used Jekyll I always end up spending a lot of time dealing with ruby related issues. Plus it being dirt slow

@pimoore yeah, it’s a lot quicker now – it wasn’t uncommon to have the work site take 4 minutes+ to build unless you used a newish Macbook. My own site takes 6-10 seconds, with 400-odd posts and pages. But Hugo is pretty much instant with thousands and thousands.

@hjertnes what is it about Hugo that makes it easier to deal with in your opinion? Is it about the lack of dependency issues or functionality wise?

@hjertnes probably a case of what you get used to. Jekyll is obviously a lot slower building sites, which is a pain in lots of ways if you’re running a professional site, not least when the build minutes start costing. We moved from a static site in the end anyway.

@pimoore Both of them have dependencies. But with hugo it is not visible to the user because golang produce a single binary.

Jekyll on the other hand require the supported version of Ruby + the correct set of ruby package versions for it all to work. And if you use plugins in your Jekyll it becomes even more complex.

Plus that sometimes it isn't that obvious that something stopped working.

The amount of time I have spent fixing issues with Hugo changes is miniscule compared to the monthly ruby package isssues I had to deal with when I used Jekyll.

@hjertnes You’re definitely right that Hugo is going to build pages faster and have fewer dependency problems than Jekyll.

However, I would say that Jekyll is easier to learn and use, especially if you’re not a specialist programmer.

I ran a commercial site on Jekyll for years and Bundler did its job well enough – we didn’t have monthly package problems.

For a blog or documentation site I’d recommend it over Hugo.

But then again, I’d probably recommend WordPress, Kirby or Statamic over all them.

@leonp I don’t think any of them are easy enough for a non developer

@hjertnes yes, I agree, however easy they claim to be to use.

@leonp Just to add to what others have said, we started with Jekyll and switched to Hugo because of performance. Making everything faster is still one of my top priorities, so ever little bit helps.

@hjertnes Not surprising to hear about Jekyll dependencies, even in my testing I recall numerous packages issues, inconsistency having to use bundle exec... to get things to work, and a general feeling of instability. It’s too bad, as for me I find liquid’s logic easier to grok.

@manton cool, makes sense!

@leonp After having used many different more or less the same template languages like them over the years I just see them all as the same with very minor differences

@pimoore they’re not that different if you sit down and get into it

@gr36 I haven’t looked at how everything fits together yet. I guess it’d be ideal for me if it was all Jekyll based, but I’m sure I could pick Hugo up again. Finding the time, isn’t it?