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Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

I've been using VitePress for a while now. I'm building everything on https://containersonaws.com/pattern/ via VitePress and an entirely custom theme. It feels great to be able to design the website using proper Vue components, compared to the quasi-template language of something like Hugo. And the page load and navigation performance has been quite nice in my opinion.

The only downside that I will mention is that builds are quite slow. I'm not sure how this will scale out as I get more pages. My Hugo website can build 100's of pages in under a second, while VitePress is taking 30-40 seconds to build around 100 pages.

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Personally, I don't care about the build times as they happen in a GH workflow [1] and the compiled sources get updated to Cloudflare Pages that's how [2] gets deployed.

[1] https://github.com/logdyhq/homepage/blob/main/.github/workfl...

[2] https://logdy.dev

Vite Pres has client-side routing, right? Like, it works without JS, but if JS is enabled, it runs as a SPA.

Yep that's right. Every page has it's own statically rendered bundle. But if you have JS on then it can fetch a chunk and rerender the page client side as a SPA.

this is where it differs from those SSG I guess, used vitepress a while ago, will reuse it later

How does VitePress compare to Jekyll in terms of developer-friendliness and page build times? I still use Jekyll for small projects because it is well-documented and just works.

I have not used Jekyll, but I think it's important to note that VitePress is Vue specific. It's designed to be used with Vue components, and it's designed to produce a single page app where navigation happens client side (though there is still a statically rendered version of each page, so it works without JS). Most other static site renderers do exclusively static rendering, without the automatic progressive enhancement to SPA. And VitePress has such intelligent client side enhancement that it even does things like preload pages in the background as soon as the link appears on screen. It adds up to a very fast and light feeling experience.

Hugo's builds are fast because it caches: does VitePress cache?

There is that, but even without cache the Go code for Hugo is blazing fast compared with the the JS bundler for VitePress, sadly

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