Astro 7.0

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• Hacker News
• 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.

  by yolkedgeek
• If you are using every single feature Astro has, your code somehow goes through every single branch (of every single dependency), etc then yes, but that'd be a pretty far-fetched scenario!

  In practice, our users typically comment quite positively on how little (if any) work major updates requires, and we offer pretty extensive upgrade guides, if that helps.

  by Princesseuh
• 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.
  by cassidoo
• How many pages is it? The performance improvements are mostly for larger sites (thousands of pages) and especially when using a lot of MDX.

  We're working on incremental builds which should help as well: https://github.com/withastro/roadmap/issues/1388

  by MatthewPhillips
• 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.

  by fnoef
• (As an outsider, ) I suspect it's because the Rust rewrite was big enough to bump the main version number.
  by ulimn
• Cloudflare bought Astro recently, and as it states in docs it previously had cache plugins for 2 companies but not Cloudflare so that may have been a motivation along with the Vite update mentioned
  by fsuts
• We unfortunately released Astro 6 only a few weeks before Vite 8 / Rolldown came out, which is why we did Astro 7 so soon. But there are very few breaking changes compared to Astro 6. That being said, some of these performance improvements (the Sätteri processor) are available in Astro 6 too.
  by MatthewPhillips
• I had tried astro for my personal website when it was released. It was a mess for me. I couldn't keep with so many components. I keep breaking things, one way or the other. I might have to try again to see what things have changed.
  by pks016
• 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.

  by stevoo
• What’s AstroCMS?
  by gigatree
• 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.

  by MoonWalk
• Web dev is a royal mess, but what isn't in current times? Too many opinions not enough direction.
  by keepupnow
• It means the island bit where you can mark areas of a page as non static and then run react or other framework as components
  by fsuts
• Astro is a meta-framework that allows you to plug in other web frameworks where you need it (React, Solid, etc). Although it would also be fair to consider Astro a sort of build tool / bundler.

  Node is a runtime, not a framework.

  So there's really only one framework here (Astro). Using other web frameworks within it is completely optional.

  by genshii
• 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.
  by AgentME
• 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)

  by microflash
• this terrified me lol I'm on 5.1.x on most of my sites
  by BorisMelnik
• This does not affect remote content, only the content written in .astro files. If you have remote content you'd use something like `set:html`: https://docs.astro.build/en/reference/directives-reference/#...

  See this example: https://stackblitz.com/edit/github-ug3paw61?file=src%2Fpages...

  by Princesseuh
• "The .astro compiler has been rewritten in Rust.".

  I'm personally awaiting the rewrite to assembly.

  by keepupnow
• Rust is so powerful it rewrites your code to assembly on-demand every time you compile ;)
  by wofo
• 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.

  https://node-modules.dev/#install=astro@7.0.6

  https://node-modules.dev/#install=astro@6.0.0

  by pier25
• The ultimate reduction is leaving JS to the browser and write backend code in Go, Rust, Java, C#,...
  by pjmlp
• This was actually part of the reason I made the Rust markdown processing, the unified ecosystem is a lot of deps!

  I still have some plans in this area that should reduce the overall count further, though.

  by Princesseuh
• 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.

  by matsemann
• 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!
  by Princesseuh
• For the good of humanity, I must ask... How much Claude? How much human?
  by keepupnow
• love the color scheme
  by stronglikedan
• great job, that is a huge accomplishment.
  by BorisMelnik
• Thanks for your work on this!
  by toddmorey