I probably only use 1 % of Astro's features, but I like how it's enabled me to build static sides as back in the days, but with a build pipeline.
So I can use components, reuse stuff, include stuff etc, basically what I would do with PHP back in the days, but now it spits out a compiled page I can host for cheap (often even free). And easy to add in some interactivity when needed. Like I render a list as a component, and very easy to ship some dynamic filtering on the frontend using the same code, but the content is still statically in the html, so served fast and good SEO.
It's very cool to see the JS ecosystem reducing dependencies and I hope this trend continues.
Astro has gone from 247 deps in v6 to 190 in v7.
I don't understand what this is, based on this statement:
"Astro supports every major UI framework. Bring your existing components and take advantage of Astro's optimized client build performance."
But isn't Astro a framework itself? And then apparently you need Node as well. The frameworks upon frameworks in Web development are baffling.
I like the idea of astro, but never really used it. My main concern is. Does v7 mean that there have been 7 breaking changes thus far? So if I started my project on v1, I had to revise it 6 times to date?
If yes, then this instability is a serious concern to me.
The AI Enhancements section was interesting. I've been wondering about the best practices for agents interacting with long-running dev servers, and Astro 7's approach (run in background and have a logs command) seems like a good model.
The switch to strict HTML compilation is just not cool, and actively prevents upgrading sites which need to deal with remote content that is not written in strict HTML.
I also wish there could be a general purpose content processing API so I can plug a different format than markdown (such as typst)
"The .astro compiler has been rewritten in Rust.".
I'm personally awaiting the rewrite to assembly.
I upgraded my website recently and it's exciting! That being said, I admit my builds didn't get faster (they actually on average slowed down a bit). Hopefully that improves, but worth noting.
I really really like Astro, but I'm either getting old or it's something else.
I just recently updated my website to Astro 6 and now... there's Astro 7. Maybe by the time I update, Astro 8 will be a few weeks in the future.
For me currently nothing beats Astro + Claude Code for building sites, maybe with some image generator sprinkled in. Build time improvements are always welcome, great job!
I have been trying to convince my marketing department to replace there archaic wordpress with an Astro build with AstroCMS and markdown for there needs.
I have build several sites using Astro 6, and i am finding the ease of building the sites amazing and exceptional in SEO as well.
I saw the integration with Hono - hadn't heard of it before, do many people use it?
Are these typical build speeds on static sites these days? It's slower than I expected for a rust re-write. (Or I guess maybe the portion re-written in rust is only a small part of the build pipeline time?)
My understanding is that astro isn't considered particularly slow?
I made the Rust compiler and the Rust Markdown pipeline (https://satteri.bruits.org) in this, let me know if you have any questions, glad to answer anything!