The increasingly popular Astro static site generator (SSG) has many stellar attributes, a staggeringly nice community1, and a rapidly growing user base. It’s been the subject of a number of my posts here, and I’ve even tried using it to build and maintain this site — more than once, in fact.
Unfortunately, it seems I can no longer do so.
I thought Astro’s recent emergence from beta testing would mean an end to how frequently it would be introducing breaking changes (which, of course, are likely with any beta). But, in trying to develop this site in Astro since then, I haven’t found that to be the case:
- Brittleness — Due mainly to one particular issue that I’ve come to call the “show-stopper,” I haven’t been able to manage an Astro version of this site because using
Astro.glob()to provide things as simple as “Previous post”/“Next post” links tends to cause call stack errors in development mode.2 - Slowness — Using MDX files in Astro had seemed to be a fix to its patience-eroding dev-mode slowness with Markdown files that I reported back in April and again in May; but, during the frequent updates to the plugin that enables the Astro/MDX combo, that slowness has kept returning.
In the end, as I told a reader who’d written to me about this and other subjects:
Even if the Astro team were to issue a permanent fix today for my show-stopper issue, the dev-side experience is still ’waaaay too slow when a site has hundreds of MDX files. They’ve fixed that more than once, but it seems to regress to molasses-level slowness — e.g., 5 to 10 seconds between an edit and the hot-refresh response — every other new series of updates. As a result, particularly as compared to working with basic Markdown in Eleventy or Hugo, I simply can’t bear working in Astro dev mode any more.
However, to be fair: the Astro folks obviously are focused on promoting it for normal commercial sites, most of which typically are going to be full of HTML/Astro files (hence no slowdown) rather than MDX files; and I can’t blame them for such a mindset, because That’s Where The Money Is™ — not in non-monetized, low-traffic, MDX-replete, nerdy blogs. 😀
[Links added.]
Working with Astro has (usually) been fun over the last year or so, but it’s time I moved on from assuming Astro will work for sites like mine. It’s a superb site-building tool, and the sky’s the limit for the company behind that tool; but the sad reality is that not every tool is intended for every job.
To the wonderful people in the Astro community:
ad astra, Astronauts. 👋
Update, 2022-10-10: Bjorn Lu, a Vite core team member and Astro “core resident,” determined that the “show-stopper” issue is due to an interaction between Vite and Node.js; his fix should be reflected in a future version of Astro. I’ll keep you advised.
Update, 2022-10-13: With today’s release of Astro 1.5.0, it appears the fix for the “show-stopper” has been included. However, the poor, laggy DX continues with Astro.glob() — which, of course, is a totally separate issue.
I’ll always be grateful for that community’s response on one very special day in my life. ↩︎
It’s a bit too reminiscent of my 2019 agonies with using dev mode in Gatsby. (Perhaps Gatsby is better now, but I have zero interest in making sure.) ↩︎
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2023-04-17 at 6:18:22 PM CDT.
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