Gatsby founder here.
Really appreciate the feedback and support for our launch today! The team worked super hard to get Incremental Builds live in public beta but are taking all the feedback (here and all over the web) as we go into full launch. Let us know what you think. Thanks!
This is great! Is there any technical limitation keeping this from being part of the open source version?
I get that Gatsby company put a lot of effort into this and wants a return on that investment, and good for them. I assume a third party could offer the same but why would they compete at the same value prop.
However an open source version to not be reliant on any company would be compelling to many.
How much is the speed issue related to the language used? I know Hugo is an order of magnitude faster than most static site generators for example - it's written in Go with e.g. 2 seconds to generate about 10K pages https://forestry.io/blog/hugo-vs-jekyll-benchmark/.
I would have thought the generation process could be massively parallelised and a typical blog page would only need a modest amount of computation e.g. concat header, footer, pull in body text, resolve a few URLs. I can't help but think about how much work a typical computer game is doing in comparison 60 times per second even without a GPU.
Is the technology behind "incremental builds" being upstreamed into the open source project?
Our team's been waiting on this for a year to start moving larger sites to Gatsby. Can't wait to try it.
so this is cool release, and no objection on that but if your pipeline has automated testing, security scans and more then you are not actually deploying in 10s
more technical details would be good but I guess either I missed it or they look at it as IP
Javascript re-invents "code typing" (Typescript)
Javascript re-invents "Promises" because callback hell
Javascript re-invents "compilers" (babel)
Javascript re-invents "build systems" (webpack, etc)
Javascript re-invents "caching" (incremental builds) - but paid, and in the cloud
Because why not.
You still need to use an api for everything. Good apps need a backend; not a JAMStack fan for anything but the most basic of sites.
Having never used a static site generator in anger, can someone explain to me like I'm five what's going on here?
My understanding is that Gatsby is a tool that converts a bunch of markdown files into a static HTML website. Why is slow builds a problem for any static site generator? Why does it need a cloud?
In other words, what problem am I supposed to be having that any of this solves?
Note, I'm trying not to be skeptical here - my company's website is hand-maintained HTML with a bunch of PHP mixed in so I can totally imagine that things may be better. But I don't understand the kinds of situations where using a 3rd party cloud to generate some static HTML solves a problem.