I recently ported my static site generator Saga from Swift to both Python and TypeScript. It was a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance, especially when it came to their type systems. This is a tale of that experience.
What would Saga look like if it were written in Python or TypeScript, rather than in Swift? Is it worth the effort to port Saga to another language?
I started building Saga, my own static site generator written in Swift, four years ago. Let’s look at the state of the project.
About ten months ago I wrote that I was confident that the API of Saga wasn't going to change a lot anymore, and that I'd release 1.0.0. Well, it's taken a little bit longer than I expected back then, but 1.0.0 has finally been released!
A hugely important part of any static site generator is of course the parsing of Markdown content. The default parser for Saga is Parsley, a custom wrapper around a cmark fork. While I am generally quite happy with it, there are some problems.
In the past few days I’ve made some pretty substantial improvements to Saga, to make it work for me and my website, which is now built using Saga.
I've already replaced my own SwiftMarkdown package...
I've replaced the Ink and Splash dependencies with my own SwiftMarkdown package.
An unexpectedly quick fourth article about Saga, after a complete redesign of the API.
In the third and final part of this series about Saga I'm looking at the pros and cons of the current system and what I might want to change.
Part 2, where I'm looking back at the current API of Saga.
In part 1 of a series of articles I'm looking at the inspiration behind my static site generator Saga, now available on Github.
I’m in the very early stages of building my own static site generator in Swift. I want the library to provide a basic Page type, that the user can then extend with custom metadata, and I need to be able to put Pages with different kinds of metadata...