Astro: Ship Less JavaScript

> By now we should be ready to accept that free software with no strings attached just isn't sustainable except for projects with big corporate backers.

That very much depends on who the authors of the software are and what their goals/motivations are. This is far too much of a blanket statement.

I agree that no one should be ashamed to sell software that they write. Also, those authors can and should be the ones to determine under what license the software is released (unless, of course, they are being paid by someone else to write it -- that's a different set of circumstances). But there are plenty of very useful open source projects that have been around for a very long time with no big corporate backers.

I don't want a build process. I don't want to have to use npm, but want the option if I desire, for something like React. And when I use React, because there is unfortunately no better option, I use `"build": "npx babel --watch public/javascripts/src --out-dir public/javascripts/. --presets react-app/prod"` and that's it. I don't want create-react-app lock-in. Eject doesn't count. That's an illusion.

My favorite process right now is a git repository that can be cloned into production, requires no build process, and works out of the box, to be statically served by any HTTP server. I commit my React builds. To me, this is the modern incarnation of Sublime Text and SFTP to my shared LAMP.

Today, I use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, with a minimal bootstrap.sh and do it on a lowendbox for under 11 USD/yr.

I use CDNs. I don't use Amazon AWS because they aren't small business friendly. Which means I still write my own bootstrap.sh provisioning scripts, and deploy VPSs by hand.

I don't want to use a JavaScript ecosystem with marketing. I would prefer that something came out and deterred all of the types of people, yes types of people that I don't want using the software I use. The type of person who thinks it's a good idea to use a technology for less than 10 years and eschews mastery and memorization.

I want to do 1 hour of work for 10,000 USD. Not 40 hours for 4,000 USD. But you cannot do that type of work grinding away never learning and building exponentially on an existing corpus of knowledge.

Less Docusaurus mentality, more man7.org.

Edit: Apparently some people can't connect the dots here and don't see how this is relevant to Astro. So, I'll spell it out:

This is another npm project that forces me to build, forces me to use npm, and forces me to use Astro-specific (whatever that is) knowledge to build web pages. I don't want that.

All of the little details about those decisions ripple out into everything else I've just talked about. If I build, I'm probably .gitignoring my builds. So my repo out of the box is worthless. Because my repo is worthless, I can't deploy straight to my target environment. Because the author already thinks my target environment shouldn't be graced by something that works out of the box, they probably don't care about the resources of those boxes. They probably don't deploy software to VPSs at all. Maybe they use Heroku or think, "that's not my problem."

I want technologies that understand the entire scope of what I'm trying to accomplish without trying to be the entire scope of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Yes! Exactly.

I don’t understand how any of this is relevant to Astro, beyond “JavaScript”.

> I can't tell from the homepage or the blog post what this does

The passage below, on the linked page, is a dead giveaway of what it does, no?

> - 100% Static HTML, No JS: Astro renders your entire page to static HTML, removing all JavaScript from your final build by default.

> - On-Demand Components: Need some JS? Astro can automatically hydrate interactive components when they become visible on the page. If the user never sees it, they never load it.