Astro 7.0 Delivers Massive Speed Boosts with New Rust Compiler and Vite 8
We are thrilled to announce Astro 7.0, our fastest release yet, featuring a complete rewrite of the compiler and Markdown pipeline in Rust. By integrating Vite 8 with the Rolldown bundler and stabilizing queued rendering, we have achieved build speed improvements of up to 61%. This update also introduces advanced routing, route caching, and dedicated enhancements for AI-assisted development to streamline your workflow.
The fastest build is the one that doesn't happen at all.
- Princesseuh
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!
- matsemann
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.
- pier25
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.
- keepupnow
"The .astro compiler has been rewritten in Rust.".
I'm personally awaiting the rewrite to assembly.
- microflash
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)