Vision & Community

Vision

Hi, I'm Loris Cro, the creator of Zine.

I'm VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, host of Zig SHOWTIME and the curator of Software You Can Love, a cycle of conferences that has run in Vancouver and Milan. I also write on my personal blog at https://kristoff.it.

Each of the links in the previous section points to a static website authored by me.

My journey in creating software (and other experiences) you can love has taught me that, if your project is serious enough, you will need a website and that in most cases the best fit will be a static website.

For this reason I've become interested in streamlining the static website building experience for myself and others who are interested in creating experiences you can love.

Zine is tailored for creators who want to make simple, elegant websites that reflect the attention to detail they already put in designing their main product.

Zine itself is designed according to this principle and this is why I've decided to design the templating exeperience of Zine, instead of blindly assuming that it would be impossible to create a solution that fits Zine better than existing off-the-shelf templating languages.

Other static site generators

My experience in working with static site generators can be succintly described as using tools that sit at two extremes in the flexibility-rigidity spectrum.

Flexibility

The most flexible SSGs that I've used are JavaScript frameworks, which give you the ability to customize the build process in any way you can imagine.

The downside of this type of tool is that it will allow you to express things in ways that are absolutely hostile to caching, hindering the SSG's ability to perform caching and ultimately feeling responsive.

The first iteration of my personal blog was written with Gatsby, which I chose at the time because I already knew JSX and didn't want to learn a new templating language. Unfortunately my blog would take literal minutes to build on a beefy MacBook Pro, and it completely broke after switching to a M1 MacBook Air.

This bad experience made me look for something more performant that would not break when changing dev environment, which led me to Hugo.

Rigidity

Hugo was until very recently my main SSG. Single executable and fast. It does have C dependencies if you want certain pre-processing features, but using Zig I was able to cross-compile it without much fuss.

Unfortunately Hugo suffers from two main issues:

Templating language

The templating language, which builds upon Go's stdlib templating package, is bad.

As a first objective flaw, it's unable to do full dependency tracking when shortcodes are involved, meaning that the dev server won't perform hot reloading on a change. This is an open issue since 2019, and I've personally also experienced false cache hits from Hugo when hot reloading does trigger (!).

A second issue I have with the templating language is that it's just unnecessarily counter-intuitive to use. This is a subjective opinion but I claim that, even setting aside Go's templating language quirks, all curly brace templating languages are a suboptimal choice when templating HTML.

There is no point in letting users express this kind of logic:

<a href="bar">
  {% if foo %}
    </a><a href="baz">
  {% end %}
</a>

In Zine malformed HTML is a build error thanks to the Super templating language which operates on HTML semantically, instead of being a glorified macro system.

Customization

The second big issue I have with Hugo has to do with customization. The flipside of being a single executable is that it's hard to customize its behavior when you need to go off the beaten path.

For https://ziglang.org I wanted to test all code snippets present on the site, which led me to fork Hugo to add that custom functionality.

But even if you want something less extreme, you will be out of luck if it's not something supported by Hugo. Want syntax highlighting for your code snippets? Unless it's one of the languages supported by Hugo, there's no simple solution.

With Hugo I had gained a faster and more portable SSG, but I had lost the ability to customize the build process.

A new sweet spot

With Zine I want to find a new sweet spot between speed, scalability and flexibility.

Like hugo

Like Hugo, Zine has a "low-code" (as opposed to full-blown JSX) templating language and a fixed project structure, because it helps making your site more maintainable and easier to collaborate on, especially when non-programmers are involved.

To learn more about this perspective, see "It's Not About the Technology" by Mason Remaley from Software You Can Love Vancouver 2023.

Unlike hugo

Unlike Hugo, Zine is not a single executable but rather a collection of tools orchestrated by the Zig build system. This means that we pay a small performance price to go from in-process communication to file-based multiprocessing, but in exchange each executable can be easily replaced with a custom implementation.

Since the Zig build system is also a package manager, replacing an executable can be done in a self-contained and portable way, especially if written in Zig.

File-based communication has the upside that it lets us cache intermediate artifacts, which can compensate for the initial performance cost, alongside the fact that Zig executables are inherently faster than Go.

Unlike JavaScript SSGs

Customization has to be expressed through the build system so that scalability is not compromised.

Community

Join my Discord server to talk about Zine and get help as an early adopter.

If you prefer forums, you can find me on https://ziggit.dev.