A new, bespoke static site generator to replace Jekyll

My blog began as a blosxom (Perl) site running on a VPS. In 2011 I moved to the new GitHub Pages, with the site generated statically by Jekyll (Ruby) on a GitHub server. It was a no-brainer: easier, faster, and cheaper, better in every way. After 15 years of Jekyll, this week I replaced it with a new, custom-built static site generator, dubbed ssg, in “C with templates” C++20. The ~8KLoC source closely follows my personal coding style including templated arenas and slices, zero dependencies, and a libc-free core. It’s wicked fast, and a complete, cold generation of my blog takes 150ms on my MacBook. That is, it’s done before Ruby would even reach Jekyll’s entry point. It’s a been a great, real-world demonstration of the effectiveness of my coding philosophy. Look around and you’ll find almost nothing visually changed. Outside of syntax highlighting, the HTML is semantically identical. I did not try to match Rouge’s syntax highlighting, just its CSS selectors so that I could use my…