novos 0.1.526

Build at the speed of thought - a self-contained, high-performance SSG
novos-0.1.526 is not a library.

novos

( aka 'novos omits very old standards' )

Build at the speed of thought.

License Rust

[!WARNING] novos is currently beta software. Expect frequent updates and potential breaking changes as we approach v1.0.

We are currently changing to Tera. For the meantime, the default template partially works. Same with the official website

What is novos?

novos is a lightning-fast static site generator (SSG) built in Rust. It takes your Markdown files and turns them into a website in milliseconds.

Features

  • Sass transpilation via native grass (no C++ or Node.js required)
  • Fast Parallelism utilizing Rayon for multi-core page generation
  • Self-Contained binary with embedded assets via rust-embed
  • Shortcodes, Includes, & Variables for flexible templating
  • RSS generation baked-in
  • search.json, so you can search
  • syntect, because who hates colors?
  • minification, because you want speed, right?
  • Axum, for a stellar webserver + WebSockts.
  • Tera, because who loves repeating themselves?

Supported OSes

Tier Operating System Notes
Tier 1 OmniOS CE Primary development
Tier 1 FreeBSD Primary development
Tier 2 Ubuntu LTS (Noble) Verified compatibility
Tier 2 Arch Linux Verified compatibility
Tier 2 Void Linux Verified compatibility
Tier 3 macOS (intel/Sillicon) "CI compiled it"
Tier 3 Windows "Wine said it worked"

Roadmap

  • Parallel page generation
  • Live reload inside dev server
  • Theme: Nord-ish
  • Plugin API (WASM + .so)
  • Taxonomies
  • Pagination

Themes

  • Solarnight (sass/solarnight.scss)
    • Solarnight is a Rose Pine inspired theme.
  • Nordish
    • A Nord inspired color palette.

Documentation

Documentation is available at docs/

Backend

  • Language: Rust (2024 Edition)
  • Markdown: pulldown-cmark (CommonMark compliant, yay!)
  • License: 3-Clause BSD

Performance Benchmarks

(The stress test was generated by ./stress.sh)

In text form

~/dev/stress/sitez $ hyperfine --warmup 3 "zola build"
Benchmark 1: zola build
  Time (mean ± σ):      4.874 s ±  0.014 s    [User: 3.949 s, System: 1.354 s]
  Range (min … max):    4.852 s …  4.895 s    10 runs
~/dev/stress/siten $ hyperfine --warmup 3 "novos build"
Benchmark 1: novos build
  Time (mean ± σ):     675.7 ms ±  14.4 ms    [User: 844.4 ms, System: 1722.4 ms]
  Range (min … max):   660.9 ms … 706.1 ms    10 runs
~/dev/stress/siteh $ hyperfine --warmup 3 "hugo"
Benchmark 1: hugo
00:00:05   Time (mean ± σ):      1.929 s ±  0.018 s    [User: 4.377 s, System: 0.529 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.910 s …  1.966 s    10 runs

In a bar chart

xychart-beta
    title "Build Time (seconds) - Lower is Better"
    x-axis [Zola, Hugo, novos]
    y-axis "Time (s)" 0 --> 5
    bar [4.87, 1.93, 0.68]

How novos achieves < 1s builds:

  • Zero-Copy Parsing: Leveraging pulldown-cmark's event-based parser.
  • Work-Stealing Parallelism: Rayon dynamically balances page rendering across all available CPU threads.
  • Sass compilation techniques: Using native grass avoids the overhead of external process calls to Node or Dart.

Commits prior to 2d1acf1be5fb605694cc2f95c5efe8dad0b35de0 are three clause BSD. Commits after that point are Apache-2.0 OR MIT