Stream: ideas

Topic: static site generator

Brian Hicks (Apr 19 2022 at 18:40):

I've been kicking around an idea for a static site generator that works just on tree-sitter parsers for a while now. I think Roc might be a nice platform to accomplish this! It'd basically work like:

• tell the ssg what page(s) to start with (index.html or whatever)
• the ssg loads that file and figures out the out edges in the resource graph, then starts walking them recursively
• if we see links to different asset types (images, styles, scripts) we include them in the output (and maybe optimize them!)
• only "live" files get put in the eventual built output. Some level of caching for builds, as well.
• it'd have multiple ways to resolve a URL: look for some HTML or an equivalently-named Markdown file
• you can tell the platform that you want to intercept some HTML node. For example, maybe you want to mark all your images with loading=lazy, or add an ID based on the content to each H1 so you can do deep linking. This is also how you'd do extremely custom elements. XML FTW?
• it would have as few opinions about CSS/JS as we can get away with

Anyway enough people have built static site generators that surely this has been explored before, but I'm not going to read the docs for every single SSG in existence just to find ideas, so… what have y'all heard of? Is there something like this that exists already? If you've used something like it, have you encountered a lot of problems with it?

(this didn't start out as secretly another excuse to play with build system ideas but it ended up that way. Apparently this is just the way my mind works.)

Brian Hicks (Apr 20 2022 at 01:37):

I guess this'd probably need to have some level of parallelism to be at all performant. Where are we at on that? Is it safe to pass RocStr and friends between threads? It doesn't look like we have any concurrency primitives yet?

Ayaz Hafiz (Apr 20 2022 at 01:44):

That sounds sweet! I haven't heard of anything like that in the SSG space, AFAIK Gatsby and Jekyll are very waterfall-y and don't do the optimizations you propose

We don't have concurrency primitives on the Roc side yet but you could do it on the platform side. I think passing RocStr should be fine with the atomic ref counts @Brendan Hansknecht added recently

Last updated: Jun 16 2026 at 16:19 UTC