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@mo8it@fosstodon.org#Hugo's slogan of being "The world’s fastest framework for building websites" is a shameless lie.
It has been raised up 3 times on Github with benchmarks showing that other full-featured static site generators like #Zola (#Rust) are faster, sometimes by 10x. Each time, the issue is closed and locked.
I migrated a couple of websites from Hugo to Zola and won't look back.
Feel free to ping me if you need any help with Zola 
@kubikpixel Here is the last issue that bundles 4 benchmarks and links to the other 2 issues that were silenced:
@mo8it Can I run external programs as a filter in templates and embed their output? I do this to translate LaTeX math to static HTML and had to fork Hugo to make it work.
@niklaskorz No because that would be a security nightmare!
If that is possible, then you can't trust any website you want to build. Even worse: You can't trust any third party template!
Imagine wanting to build a static website and arbitrary code is executed 
@niklaskorz But I thought about it and found a hack that doesn't include running external commands. Give me some time to send you a demonstration :D
@mo8it Now I'm curious ^^
@mo8it @niklaskorz The main hold-up for trying it has been that I couldn't find a way to handle citations and generally process bibtex with links to DOI and arXiv version/author's PDF.
@niklaskorz @mo8it @typst Yes! In principle, this is coming. I'm hopeful that mdBook and Zola support will be added after this is complete.
@mo8it I don't trust third party templates to begin with, mine is written entirely from scratch :) Hugo uses the same reasoning for denying this feature and honestly it's tiring, I know what my template does and it never receives untrusted user input.
@mo8it @niklaskorz Now I believe that writing Zola extensions as Wasm modules would be a good idea.
Thanks for pointing out Zola.
There are questions I have about fastest; even a relatively slow static site generator is going to be fast enough for many use cases. And "fastest" is nebulous and could mean "fast to get started", "fastest to learn", etc. Competing on features and ease of use seems to be wiser in this case rather than worrying about a slogan.
I do see hugo's home page makes a big deal of performance and invites this debate. A bit silly of them.
@faassen @kubikpixel Yeah, they mean performance as you saw on their homepage.
About the importance of performance for static site generators: It matters for responsiveness (reload after saving a file) and huge websites.
You could also have complex macros that should run as fast as possible.
Performance matters for some use cases for sure. But I wonder how common the massive website use case is for tools like Hugo. I have had a blog since 2005 with admittedly only about 200 articles and have had no problem regenerating it with Python based generators. My reason to switch to something new would refresh it and make maintenance easier.
@mo8it @kubikpixel “Zola, the static site generator that’s 10x faster than the world’s fastest static site generator.”