Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools.
I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team.
EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.
I think DevTools can be a very good money maker… I wrote two apps that were basically dev tools and they were the biggest of my money makers. I think it’s easier to make money from dev tools that are “apps” than dev tools that are “fundamental technologies” though so it probably heavily depends on the type of dev tools…
> Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of world view you need to have, to think that being bought out by some megacorp with an at-best 50/50 chance of continuing existing products is an accurate measure of a "good business", much less that its the only measure.
Dev tools that support an ecosystem of things. A dev tool by itself isn’t that valuable unless it’s a backbone of an ecosystem. Astro is. React is. TUI.js is not.
A brand - like charm bracelet - with dev tools is another avenue. Why build one when you can build dozens?
In the end it’s about providing value. Not novelty but value. Make your new overlords better or faster or make everyone better or faster. Provide a value that can be measured.
I’ve used Astro on Cloudflare for a few years for my personal website (username.com). They’ve both been absolutely fantastic, I can’t say enough good things about both of them. My website has all 100s on PageSpeed/Lighthouse, and that’s because of the performance focus of both Astro and Cloudflare. No credit to me at all. It was mainly because Astro prioritised shipping 0 JS unless it was absolutely necessary and Cloudflare is exceedingly good at serving static HTML.
But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.
I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML?
By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up.
The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.
Likewise! I built my personal blog with Astro and host on Cloudflare (username.dev), and feel guilty about taking advantage of such excellent software and free tier. Here’s hoping they find a way to take my money soon.
I'm in the same boat as you. I've built a personal home page with Astro and hosted it on Cloudflare. It has been really cheap, only paying for worker subscription at 5 dollars per month. The site has been running non-stop essentially without downtime. And as you say the user experience of Astro's static HTML, css and minimal JS output on Cloudflare edge CDN network is really good.
But with the events of the world being what they are I have been considering moving my Astro page to BunnyCDN and thus Europe (where I live). The only Cloudflare specific feature I've used is D1 database so migrating now shouldn't be too difficult. I really hope Cloudflare does not make it difficult to use Astro on other providers, either intentionally or by accident. Next.js for a long time was essentially a framework that only ran great on Vercel, and using other providers was asking to become a second citizen. I believe it is somewhat better now with proper provider plugin system, but still.
Astro has been great and I understand they need to find a way to economically sustain their business. Joining a big company like Cloudflare is one way to do that. I can't complain too much never having opted to use Astro's commercial offerings. So I only hope they keep Astro open. I'm building a new product on top of Astro now and would hate to see it become a Cloudflare-only product.
It would be good to understand what Cloudflare gets out of the deal. The article is very much just "Astro, but someone else pays the bills!" which is of course lovely for Astro.
Same reason vercel buys open source... it makes cloudflare always a great deployment option for all Astro sites, which in turn helps cloudflare's core business.
For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago
With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)
They get to make Astro -> Cloudflare the default publishing pipeline. Sure users may pick something else, but even if a small % stick with Cloudflare that's an overall win.
Nextjs doesn’t really work on cloudflare with the latest versions. There is an adapter but it’s buggy as hell. The direction is also likely to continue: https://omarabid.com/nextjs-vercel
Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.
None of us have access to Cloudflare's internal data. But a reasonable guess is that enough of their current and future paying customers use Astro? I'm one of those - Astro hosted on Cloudflare.
Sometimes it is cheaper to buy a company than build the internal tool team you might have had to build from scratch anyway. Half acqui-hire, half knowing you've built something on-top of it and want it to stick around.
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
I don't understand how Cloudflare's bottom line benefits:
Some here say they gain Astro users, that Cloudflare will become part of the default deployment. But given Cloudflare's current scale, how much are Astro's users worth? Is it even worth the distraction for Cloudflare? Companies lose energy to lots of small, low-value operations.
Most acquisitions begin with announcments that nothing will change, in order to retain customers and employees. They say '<acquistion> is so great, we don't want to interfere, and we're keeping existing management and letting them run things'. After the transition period - often 1 year - the old managers leave and the big changes happen, sometimes including shutting down the product because it was an acqui-hire all along or an IP acquisition.
It seems like Cloudflare must perceive some profit beyond what is announced.
It's very powerful to have ownership over a framework that many developers are familiar and like!
It might not be clear just yet what the path to monetization looks like but an easy example would be deeper integrations with the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem (for example allowing R2 to be easily along with something like duckdb to live in a world of truly local analytics or something like that).
It seems like these great open source frameworks need to monetize by building a platform around the product but these days it's hyper competitive (ex. Vercel, Cloudflare) and it's hard to get started without an incredible differentiator. So, while monetizing independently as a company might be difficult, Astro can provide a lot of value to the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem.
Why does Vercel provide Next.js? Aside from talent & tightly coupling Astro to their services, their North Star might be similar to Weekly Number of New Domains Hosted On Cloudflare. Sponsoring a framework that helps ship performant websites feeds into that metric.
Yeah I see the benefit right off the bat, this is a direct head to Vercel and NextJS.
With that said, I have no idea on the market share or profitability of any of that or Cloudflare vs Vercel.
Also perhaps the rails that will be put in place for seamless 1 click Astro deploy will continue to push them forward with other technologies as well, so it's not just about Astro.
I do feel that fear as well, is this an unnecessary distraction for CloudFlare? Time will tell.
vertical integration probably, if you sell web services helping people get to the point that they need them is worth
buying into something that becomes popular is good advertising for cheap (react is probably the only reason for any kind of goodwill at all towards facebook)
as a function of earnings this is a rounding error purchase for them
> In 2021, Astro was born out of frustration. The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side.
Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
IMO it's because the web has a huge diversity of behaviors (in a way that, say, native apps do not) but a monoculture on the development side.
React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.
And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.
Whenever you think that everything old is new again and we're just retracing our steps from the past, you risk missing the lessons learned in the meantime.
It gets worse, some teams would get x real estate on a website, and one team would use React, another Vue, another would use Angular because they owned that real estate on your site and that's what the team was best with. Astro lets you still do that, but turns it all into static content. Think of orgs the size of Google or YouTube, there are different teams responsible for what looks like a small thing but different pieces of a giant pie.
> The trend at the time was that every website should be architected as an application, and then shipped to the user’s browser to render.
This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand why "islands" isn't just "bits of JavaScript on a static page".
It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
I like the idea behind Astro, I've used it for a couple websites here and there.
I'm a bit worried about the complexity brought by Astro supporting all these different frameworks through its adapters, and how stable and maintainable those websites will be in the future.
For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.
But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.
I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
It's not complaining when said OSS project has taken $10+million in VC funding, at that point it becomes a matter of priorities and by explicitly ignoring a major issue the owners are telling you exactly what they care about (capturing that bag, not helping users).
I like the concept of making frameworks pluggable with different adapters. In my experience, though, it’s dangerous to hitch your wagon to anything but the top 1 or 2 most popular adapters in a given project like this.
The JavaScript web framework ecosystem has this problem everywhere lately where frameworks try to be everything to everyone and support every use case anyone might want. It’s noble in theory but without dedicated and active maintainers for each combination there’s bound to be something left behind.
My heuristic has been to only use adapters that the core project maintainers appear to favor. The maintainers for sub-project adapters that are introduced later frequently have maintainers that come and go, with long periods where things start breaking and nobody is interested in fixing them.
I havent had a chance to fully use it in a project yet, but it is one of my favorite projects only tinker with it, I'm glad it will receive funding to keep it going. It is definitely a solid gem of open source since its not married to one single SPA framework.
Any reason you didn't use alpine for client side interactivity? When I went down the "use a framework plugin in Astro" route, I found it too jarring and reverted to alpine which I found worked well enough.
Surprised this isn't in the article, but Cloudflare has been moving all their docs to Astro's Starlight docs framework. I'm guessing this is a way to prioritize features for Cloudflare:
I agree a good exit for devtools is good for devtools. I'd like to understand it better.
The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it?
The reason given in complementarity (content and infrastructure), but doesn't that mean that Cloudflare is moving into content? Perhaps it's fair to say some content fits better with Cloudflare, or making it easier to just have static sites is beneficial to Cloudflare?
Is there a convention about announcements, for the acquired to announce happily first to bring customers, and then the acquirer to confirm their benign intentions? When can we expect Cloudflare's take?
I'm a little wary of this. I'd been using Gatsby for my static websites for a long time, until it got eaten up by Netlify and then sunset; I switched over to Astro at that point, but now I'm getting a sense of déjà vu.
Gatsby was sunset because it was a bad framework build on bad decisions [1]. I tried to use it when it was new, and it was immediately obvious that "GraphQL for everything" leads to horrible DX.
I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues. With Astro, I receive a lot less issues and the maintenance is easier! From my perspective if Cloudflare keep it that way, it'll be a win.
Just setup my personal blog again after a four years hiatus using Astro (loved the good docs). Kind of disappointed, but given how simple static site generators are, probably something Claude could crank out easily with parity of features I actually use then wouldn't be beholden to any project's creators.
I love Astro - migrated my blog there (here it was a gradual improvement), migrated company website there (here a lot, to joy of everyone). In the times of vibe coding, there is much less reason to use WYSWIG website editors. In our company, a non-technical assistant, modified website with Claude Code.
I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework.
At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!
Astro is amazing. I've been using it for a couple of years now. Initially only for static sites but now I'm building the UI of all my web projects with it.
I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
This is the main thing for me. If I can keep the cf workers backend in the same repo and deploy them together I will consider leaving Next.js for good.
Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS).
I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...
This is overly cynical without reason. CloudFlare is hardly "big tech" even if it is a "big" "tech" company. They have no record of killing or abusing open source projects.
Been running my technical knowledge base on Astro for about a year now (ketankhairnar.com). Congrats to the team on the acquisition - here's what stood out from a product/engineering perspective:
Content modeling that actually scales. Built a three-tier system: Concepts (foundational knowledge) → Deep Dives (series-based learning paths) → Systems (production case studies). Each concept tracks prerequisites, related topics, interview relevance by level (L5-L8), and links back to which deep dives use it. Zod validates everything at build time. This isn't a blog template - it's a knowledge graph with static output.
Islands architecture delivers on its promise. React hydrates only for search (Fuse.js across all content types) and a few interactive bits. Rest is zero-JS HTML. Coming from years of Next.js, the bundle size difference is stark. Users on flaky mobile connections notice.
Extensibility without framework lock-in. Wrote a custom Shiki transformer for ASCII diagram highlighting - ERROR renders red, FIX green, DECISION orange. Dynamic OG images generated at build via Satori+Resvg. No Lambda cold starts, no external services, just static assets. Infra cost: basically zero.
View Transitions shipped before others figured it out. One import, smooth page transitions. Small detail, big UX lift.
Where it gets tricky: Complex content relationships require multiple getCollection() calls and manual joins. Works fine, but a query builder would help for sites with heavy cross-linking. Also, the content layer is powerful but documentation assumes simpler use cases.
Product observation: Astro found a real gap - content sites that need occasional interactivity but don't want SPA overhead. Most frameworks optimize for apps and retrofit content. Astro did the opposite and it shows.
Curious how Cloudflare integration plays out. Edge rendering + this content model could be interesting for personalization without sacrificing static performance.
I love astro, it's been such a pleasure to use and totally solved my need for a flexible platform. I managed to retire a bunch of Wordpress sites and I've never looked back. Hopefully I can still run it on netlify.
I noticed the astro docs has lot of mention of Cloudflare worker as well, is there any reason why you didnt go with Cloudflare pages instead? I’d have guessed pages would be the perfect fit for hosting a rendered astro website
Big difference is that Anthropic blocks competitors from using its products (they literally cut direct api access. Or even through 3rd party like Cursor).
All wrongs in Gatsby have been gotten right in Astro. What will happen next remains to be seen, but currently Astro is amazing for a few specific cases it covers. The performance, developer experience and documentation are all great.
Hope that SSR remains first class as time goes on. I think Astro’s DX is superb overall, and am bullish on server-rendered components in MPAs with a sprinkling of hypermedia libs for better UX.
Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content.
All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.
This was inevitable. We're seeing the "Vercel-ification" of the edge. For a long time, Cloudflare had the superior infrastructure (Workers, R2, KV), but lacked the cohesive "onramp" that Next.js provides for Vercel. By acquiring Astro, Cloudflare finally owns the full stack, from the local dev experience to the global edge delivery.
The real question is whether Cloudflare can maintain Astro's "framework agnostic" soul while being incentivized to push everyone toward Workers/Pages.
I have always liked Astro. It also works great with AI tools since its combination of markdown and code. Was able to vibe code a quick blog template and deploy to cloudflare in minutes with an existing headless backend - https://sleekcms-astro-blog.pages.dev/
This is a great news for Astro. It ticks all the boxes when being used to build heavy content and SEO driven websites. I've been using (Astro + Cloudflare workers/pages) as my go-to stack to build my Java gamedev resources website [1] and gaming portal [2], so far and the experience is very positive. Deploying static files to Cloudflare edges feels natural and frictionless.
Still a bit concerned that it might be too tempting to build an entire website infrastructure around cloudflare, which is a single point of failure. But there is really no better alternatives at the moment. I tried self-hosting but eventually resorted to cloudflare because of bad bots, ai, scrappers kept hammering on my sites.
About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right?
NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc.
It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.
How to measure the popularity of FOSS projects though?
Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias?
The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week.
That's the idea.
Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
VC still use github stars as a viable metric, at some point you have to say aloud that they are basically engaging in shammanism and ritual sacrifices.
Cloudflare's goal is to become the default choice for anyone deploying an app to the cloud. It makes sense for them to support popular frameworks such as Astro, so that they can ensure that the frameworks work very well on their Workers platform.
Anyone except users that need to serve the German market. Due to peering issues with the biggest German ISP that have been unresolved for years, websites hosted with Cloudflare simply don’t load in the evening.
Adobe could have benefited from doing this acquisition but they can be somewhat forgiven as they are already pushing Edge Delivery Services which is based in NextJS although it's a different approach. Combined with the Universal Editor they have a solid headless authoring setup for enterprise CMS.
But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.
I've been using Astro for a couple years and it's delightful. I actually started using it for my docs because I saw Cloudflare was using it. I hope they are a good steward of the tech!
Oh no. This isn’t good. I’m glad that the team gets a payout but as an Astro user I don’t love it being owned by CF and that the goals of the project (at least indirectly) goes from the best way to deploy it to the best way to deploy it using CF.
I don't anticipate it changing like that. You still do a build using Vite and deploy the static assets. How could they change that to make it difficult to host elsewhere?
Wow, these are the same people behind Pika/Skypack and Snowpack. I can remember the day when they announced the Astro project, and now it's joining Cloudflare, incredible progress.
My favorite framework, and what has brought me much deeper into the world of web development. It's what I have used for me personal page https://bryanhogan.com/ . I'm happy to see it get funding, although I hope this doesn't introduce entshittification. So far I'm hopeful though.
It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
Astro is my favorite framework for static sites. It's hard to describe but it just "makes sense". You don't need complex build setups and you can get the best of all worlds with great SSG capabilities + can easily express things with React when needed for example.
I wish there was another path to monetization besides joining a larger company but I'm happy that the team will get to continue building out an amazing framework!
I found that Vite does a great job of deploying static websites. All I had to do was add Vite as a dev dependency in my pacakge.json and make sure all the page routes in vite.config.js.
I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.
This is cool, I use astro when I just want to spin up a quick site without having to fight the framework (looking at you, Nextjs) and the main thing I disliked was the initiatives around paid extras they had going
Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech
From a developer perspecive, I was going to go "Ahh shit here we go again"
But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has
If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc)
Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase
That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<)
So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1?
Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool)
Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market.
I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)
I hope they maintain a clear path to delay separately too.
With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc
Wow, amazing news. At Themefisher, we’ve built 40+ Astro templates used by hundreds of Astro devs and many client sites. Also great to hear it was Cloudflare!!
Hope Astro keeps growing.
Astro is my favorite way to build websites (at least, of the kind its great at) and I'm happy for the team; Cloudflare is a super cool place to work. Excited to see in what directions this will develop. They have a real shot at being the next Next.
Only mildly surprising - Astro + CF Pages/Workers have been my go-to for when I want to spin up a static site or do anything else and it does feel like they've been really working on the integration between the two.
If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime.
Congrats to Fred and team! Developing and maintaining a complex framework takes lots of funding, and I’m glad Astro found a new home that provides that.
With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design.
It still baffles me why Netlify did that. Gatsby seemed to have already been dying, even before the acquisition; and it didn't look like Netlify was planning to invest in it.
Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it.
Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.
I recently rebuilt my site with Parcel + React Server Components. RSC are designed to solve many of the same problems that Astro does. And Parcel is “just” a bundler and not a framework, so it has less magic and gives you more control.
I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.
Well, there's this other project that recently secured funding from a company that has a proven track record of supporting great open-source projects like Astro, TanStack, and Hono without trying to capture or lock anything down.
Welp, I'm worried. I like Astro, but maybe it's time to make my own SSG, to not ever end up in the hand of a few big-sharks that consolidate and enshittify everything.
This spam LLM account "MarkusAllen" (towards the very end) could be used by an adversory to discredit books / courses /"youtube channel" they link to. This is reverse psychology attack vector made possible by an LLM.
ITT People arguing about how cloudflare is gonna unfairly favor their own platform and lock people in by making easier to deploy astro sites as if you can't already do it just by connecting a git repo to cloudflare pages with 1 click.
i'd personalloy love a quick video demo on the home screen, with someone walking through the experience of using the app; other than that, looks interesting;
I don't think it's really targeted at building apps, as far as I can tell its whole pitch has always been that that most websites are not apps and therefore most websites do not need a full JS framework like Next.js.
They even say it in this blog:
"Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"
On inter-island communication, I actually think less is more – I find a lot of the recent big features like this they have added unnecessarily constrain you to doing things a certain way, while the reason I liked Astro in the first place was the simplicity.
You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)
I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.
It's very simple to use. I tried a few static site generators and Astro gave me the most freedom and was the most approachable, pretty much no learning curve. You can use it with MULTIPLE web frameworks at the same time so it's pretty damn great. It gives you many options to do one thing so you can do things your way which is a delight for tinkerers
Meta response: This account’s recent comment history is almost exclusively self promotion for their content, YouTube channel, and school. Much of the comment text appears LLM generated with classic signs such as the em dash, bullet point lists, and this-not-that comparisons that are common to LLM generated output.
It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.
This is 100% an AI generated post. Incredibly disappointing to see this stuff making its way to HN. If you want to promote your school, at least write a post yourself.
> Linux: 33 years old, runs the internet, community-funded
Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.
GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.
SQLite made and makes a lot of money from a lot of the people who use them. It's free for us to use, but it wasn't free for Motorola and AOL and Nokia (and later Google, Apple and Adobe) who contracted the team to build it out, add features, fix bugs on it. This wasn't FOSS funded by a few people's free time. It was a commercial business that made money by finding product market fit - the best embedded database in the world. Their scale then allowed them to find more bugs, fix them and become more reliable than anything else.
> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)
> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.
> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.
If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.
The VC funding model is broken in general - it's not only bad for open source projects, it's bad for most projects.
Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.
SQLite probably never took VC money, yes. People pay them for work.
Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.
Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.
> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.
Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
Not really an apples to apples comparison. You are comparing it to core technologies that millions of things sit on. There will always be money for that.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
arjie|1 month ago
I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team.
EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do these nice things and go nowhere but now that companies like Bun and Astro have gotten acquired, it demonstrates a future for others; therefore we will get more things like Astral's `uv` and so on". Hope that clarifies.
woodruffw|1 month ago
Edit: OP clarified what they meant, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding on my part!
umpalumpaaa|1 month ago
css_apologist|1 month ago
if dev tools can only be "monetized" by being bought out, it does not feel sustainable on any level
we will see companies attempt to do things like close source these projects, go subscription based, or just straight up drop support
there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around
same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others
stephenr|1 month ago
I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of world view you need to have, to think that being bought out by some megacorp with an at-best 50/50 chance of continuing existing products is an accurate measure of a "good business", much less that its the only measure.
alephnerd|1 month ago
You'll see a lot more in the next 12 months ;)
twelvedogs|1 month ago
reactordev|1 month ago
A brand - like charm bracelet - with dev tools is another avenue. Why build one when you can build dozens?
In the end it’s about providing value. Not novelty but value. Make your new overlords better or faster or make everyone better or faster. Provide a value that can be measured.
nindalf|1 month ago
But I also see the difficulty that Astro faced here. Despite being happy with the framework, I never paid for it. The paid offerings didn’t strike a chord with me. And it was partly because whatever they offered, Cloudflare already offered on a very generous free tier.
I'm glad the team have got a second life within Cloudflare,. I'm happy for the people who've given me such excellent software for free for years. Thanks folks!
ljm|1 month ago
By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up.
The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along. Open an FTP client, drag and drop, and boom - new HTMl is served.
kevinskii|1 month ago
snorremd|1 month ago
But with the events of the world being what they are I have been considering moving my Astro page to BunnyCDN and thus Europe (where I live). The only Cloudflare specific feature I've used is D1 database so migrating now shouldn't be too difficult. I really hope Cloudflare does not make it difficult to use Astro on other providers, either intentionally or by accident. Next.js for a long time was essentially a framework that only ran great on Vercel, and using other providers was asking to become a second citizen. I believe it is somewhat better now with proper provider plugin system, but still.
Astro has been great and I understand they need to find a way to economically sustain their business. Joining a big company like Cloudflare is one way to do that. I can't complain too much never having opted to use Astro's commercial offerings. So I only hope they keep Astro open. I'm building a new product on top of Astro now and would hate to see it become a Cloudflare-only product.
Congratulations to the Astro team!
deepfriedbits|1 month ago
BenGosub|1 month ago
philipallstar|1 month ago
mpeg|1 month ago
For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nextjs has no support, the draft PR to add support for Sveltekit has been parked until the next major version, Astro only just added support in their beta 6.0 release 3 days ago
With this acquisition, Astro will probably be first to future updates that increase compatibility with cloudflare. It's smart, and was probably not very expensive (more of an acqui-hire)
pxtail|1 month ago
paxys|1 month ago
csomar|1 month ago
Source: I use cloudflare and used to run my app there (nextjs) and had to do a migration to vite.js. So the way I see it, this is cloudflare response to vercel.
nindalf|1 month ago
bflesch|1 month ago
Aissen|1 month ago
zipy124|1 month ago
I also wouldn't be surprised if cloudflare wants to build this into their site-hosting capabilities.
philipwhiuk|1 month ago
lateral_cloud|1 month ago
pier25|1 month ago
richardwhiuk|1 month ago
This is probably just an acquihire.
kelvinjps10|1 month ago
adverbly|1 month ago
Its quite a nice DX actually.
I could see Cloudflare just wanting to push for a bit more vertical integration in the space to give themselves some more options.
jayanmn|1 month ago
whimsicalism|1 month ago
mmooss|1 month ago
Some here say they gain Astro users, that Cloudflare will become part of the default deployment. But given Cloudflare's current scale, how much are Astro's users worth? Is it even worth the distraction for Cloudflare? Companies lose energy to lots of small, low-value operations.
Most acquisitions begin with announcments that nothing will change, in order to retain customers and employees. They say '<acquistion> is so great, we don't want to interfere, and we're keeping existing management and letting them run things'. After the transition period - often 1 year - the old managers leave and the big changes happen, sometimes including shutting down the product because it was an acqui-hire all along or an IP acquisition.
It seems like Cloudflare must perceive some profit beyond what is announced.
jimmyl02|1 month ago
It might not be clear just yet what the path to monetization looks like but an easy example would be deeper integrations with the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem (for example allowing R2 to be easily along with something like duckdb to live in a world of truly local analytics or something like that).
It seems like these great open source frameworks need to monetize by building a platform around the product but these days it's hyper competitive (ex. Vercel, Cloudflare) and it's hard to get started without an incredible differentiator. So, while monetizing independently as a company might be difficult, Astro can provide a lot of value to the rest of the Cloudflare ecosystem.
some1else|1 month ago
I have no inside knowledge, though.
willtemperley|1 month ago
I personally would like a highly managed Astro solution. Astro is simple but highly extendable.
I can only hope they wean themselves off NPM somehow.
mikodin|1 month ago
With that said, I have no idea on the market share or profitability of any of that or Cloudflare vs Vercel.
Also perhaps the rails that will be put in place for seamless 1 click Astro deploy will continue to push them forward with other technologies as well, so it's not just about Astro.
I do feel that fear as well, is this an unnecessary distraction for CloudFlare? Time will tell.
twelvedogs|1 month ago
buying into something that becomes popular is good advertising for cheap (react is probably the only reason for any kind of goodwill at all towards facebook)
as a function of earnings this is a rounding error purchase for them
NicoJuicy|1 month ago
Cloudflare is becoming an alternative for Azure, AWS, ... Many don't realize it yet, because they don't know what Cloudflare is offering.
alexjurkiewicz|1 month ago
tonyhart7|1 month ago
like do you understand which company doing the same thing ????? Vercel is
now we talking, cloudflare want to extend their portofolio and product offering by integrate from top to bottom like vercel does
its doens't make sense/oblivious because we view it as standalone product rather than entire suite of product offering that well integrate vertically
embedding-shape|1 month ago
Was it? Hot damn, I knew it'll eventually happen, but we truly are just running around in circles. Eventually these same people will do the same loop around, creating new frameworks because the current "server<>client" model suddenly doesn't make any sense anymore, and of course this should be rendered server-side.
Why are we doomed to repeat this, and why does it happen so quickly particularly in web development? We have each other's histories and knowledge right in front of us, what's missing for us to not continue just running around in circles like this?
afavour|1 month ago
React makes sense if you're making Gmail. It doesn't really make sense if you're making a mostly static blog. But because there are more job opportunities in the former (when you consider the wealth of internal web apps out there in the world) all the training courses folks take emphasize React and an app-centric way of thinking about the web.
And perhaps most importantly, it's good enough. It works. Users get by with it. And the developer experience is better than it was in the days of Backbone etc. So few push for change.
Vinnl|1 month ago
giancarlostoro|1 month ago
maelito|1 month ago
This is wrong. Some websites are better mostly (mostly) rendered on the client (we call them "apps", like a map application) and some are better mostly rendered on the server (like blogs).
It was and will be.
Squarex|1 month ago
philipwhiuk|1 month ago
It feels like the "JavaScript as a Server Side Language" folk are just repeatedly re-inventing stuff that has been done a million times by other systems with a different back-end only with a new fancy name.
boxed|1 month ago
[deleted]
__jonas|1 month ago
For instance: I've been using Astro with Svelte to build static sites with some components that require client-side interactivity. I really like that Astro doesn't ship any JS by default and just outputs static HTML, and when I want some page to have an interactive JS component, Svelte is an option that produces a relatively small amount of client JS.
But: Using Svelte with Astro this way for static sites has been broken since August 2025. As soon as you have a conditionally rendered child component in Svelte, Astro fails to bundle the styles for it in the static output of the site, and it does that ONLY in production, which is really devious, you could build a whole site (using astro dev) without knowing and then it breaks when you deploy it.
The issue is here: https://github.com/withastro/astro/issues/14252
I don't want to be complaining about how quickly issues get addressed in an OSS project that I'm not paying for, I don't blame them for not keeping tabs on every framework integration, I just would love to build websites with the latest versions Astro and Svelte, and I unfortunately have the feeling I should have just gone with SvelteKit for a smoother experience.
shimman|1 month ago
Aurornis|1 month ago
The JavaScript web framework ecosystem has this problem everywhere lately where frameworks try to be everything to everyone and support every use case anyone might want. It’s noble in theory but without dedicated and active maintainers for each combination there’s bound to be something left behind.
My heuristic has been to only use adapters that the core project maintainers appear to favor. The maintainers for sub-project adapters that are introduced later frequently have maintainers that come and go, with long periods where things start breaking and nobody is interested in fixing them.
pier25|1 month ago
giancarlostoro|1 month ago
catoAppreciator|1 month ago
sureglymop|1 month ago
yawnxyz|1 month ago
> https://blog.cloudflare.com/open-source-all-the-way-down-upg...
fr3dx|1 month ago
"At Cloudflare, we use Astro, too — for our developer docs, website, landing pages, and more"
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/
buu700|1 month ago
w10-1|1 month ago
The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it?
The reason given in complementarity (content and infrastructure), but doesn't that mean that Cloudflare is moving into content? Perhaps it's fair to say some content fits better with Cloudflare, or making it easier to just have static sites is beneficial to Cloudflare?
Is there a convention about announcements, for the acquired to announce happily first to bring customers, and then the acquirer to confirm their benign intentions? When can we expect Cloudflare's take?
sixo|1 month ago
Lots of reasons, but above all, control.
re-thc|1 month ago
In defense? Someone else can acquire it.
nozzlegear|1 month ago
jakubmazanec|1 month ago
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39619110
brunoarueira|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
piffey|1 month ago
stared|1 month ago
I hope that this acquisition will go well. It would be sad to lose this great framework. At the same time, we deploy on Cloudflare. So their business is to keep Astro cool so that more people will use Claudflare, it would be a win-win!
pier25|1 month ago
I wonder if there will be some sort of collab between Hono and Astro given that Yusukue also works at Cloudflare.
upcoming-sesame|1 month ago
TurdF3rguson|1 month ago
phartenfeller|1 month ago
arcanemachiner|1 month ago
I will never use Cloudflare if I can help it, but this outcome is preferable to Astro becoming abandonware.
arcfour|1 month ago
dvtkrlbs|1 month ago
KetanKhairnar|1 month ago
Content modeling that actually scales. Built a three-tier system: Concepts (foundational knowledge) → Deep Dives (series-based learning paths) → Systems (production case studies). Each concept tracks prerequisites, related topics, interview relevance by level (L5-L8), and links back to which deep dives use it. Zod validates everything at build time. This isn't a blog template - it's a knowledge graph with static output.
Islands architecture delivers on its promise. React hydrates only for search (Fuse.js across all content types) and a few interactive bits. Rest is zero-JS HTML. Coming from years of Next.js, the bundle size difference is stark. Users on flaky mobile connections notice.
Extensibility without framework lock-in. Wrote a custom Shiki transformer for ASCII diagram highlighting - ERROR renders red, FIX green, DECISION orange. Dynamic OG images generated at build via Satori+Resvg. No Lambda cold starts, no external services, just static assets. Infra cost: basically zero.
View Transitions shipped before others figured it out. One import, smooth page transitions. Small detail, big UX lift.
Where it gets tricky: Complex content relationships require multiple getCollection() calls and manual joins. Works fine, but a query builder would help for sites with heavy cross-linking. Also, the content layer is powerful but documentation assumes simpler use cases.
Product observation: Astro found a real gap - content sites that need occasional interactivity but don't want SPA overhead. Most frameworks optimize for apps and retrofit content. Astro did the opposite and it shows.
Curious how Cloudflare integration plays out. Edge rendering + this content model could be interesting for personalization without sacrificing static performance.
MaintenanceMode|1 month ago
tnolet|1 month ago
dkhenry|1 month ago
Now we just need Cloudflare to buy one of the DBaaS companies so they have a solid relational offering.
hdra|1 month ago
samtp|1 month ago
upcoming-sesame|1 month ago
bilater|1 month ago
TiredOfLife|1 month ago
itsafarqueue|1 month ago
BenGosub|1 month ago
skeptrune|1 month ago
pcthrowaway|1 month ago
mattgreenrocks|1 month ago
Some features of my SSR-based side project feel like I had to hack them on, such as a hook that runs only on app start (hacked in via middleware) or manually needing to set cache control headers for auth’d content.
All in all, really happy with it. And it isn’t next.js.
TeamCommet1|1 month ago
The real question is whether Cloudflare can maintain Astro's "framework agnostic" soul while being incentivized to push everyone toward Workers/Pages.
yusufnb|1 month ago
gulugawa|1 month ago
Websites should not be vibe coded.
rimmontrieu|1 month ago
Still a bit concerned that it might be too tempting to build an entire website infrastructure around cloudflare, which is a single point of failure. But there is really no better alternatives at the moment. I tried self-hosting but eventually resorted to cloudflare because of bad bots, ai, scrappers kept hammering on my sites.
[1] https://raizensoft.com/tutorials/ [2] https://ookigame.com
kylecazar|1 month ago
About the download stats for open source frameworks and libraries.. I keep reading claims of "millions of weekly downloads" -- surely this is a noisy metric, right?
NPM just counts GET requests. A significant number of those must be from CI/CD pipelines, mirrors, build servers, etc.
It still signals popularity, but probably to a much lesser degree than implied.
wiether|1 month ago
Number of downloads? Number of stars on GH? Number of content on social medias?
The absolute value is meaningless in itself, but there's a big difference between a library that is downloaded a thousand or millions of times each week. That's the idea.
Meanwhile for-profit projects have actual customers or revenues to demonstrate popularity.
shimman|1 month ago
maxencecornet|1 month ago
kjgkjhfkjf|1 month ago
dzogchen|1 month ago
pantulis|1 month ago
But I really feel like Akamai is who dropped the ball here, this was a low hanging fruit for them and they're lacking offering this capability to offer their corporate clients as they transition to full headless. Now it's going to be their competition (Cloudflare, even Fastly through Adobe & the EDS push) who will try to take a portion of their cake.
bastawhiz|1 month ago
victorbjorklund|1 month ago
sp4cec0wb0y|1 month ago
Alifatisk|1 month ago
jtbaker|1 month ago
bryanhogan|1 month ago
It's the first framework I recommend to web dev beginners, after they have built something with plain HTML and CSS.
jimmyl02|1 month ago
I wish there was another path to monetization besides joining a larger company but I'm happy that the team will get to continue building out an amazing framework!
sidcool|1 month ago
lifetimerubyist|1 month ago
I think donating to the Apache Foundation is preferable.
gulugawa|1 month ago
I've been skeptical about trying Astro because it seems to have unnecessary complexity. Also, I don't see any evidence that Cloudflare is going to prioritize making Astro easier to use.
Otterlord|1 month ago
85392_school|1 month ago
8cvor6j844qw_d6|1 month ago
Used this for a portfolio site and and not sure if this news is good or bad for its future.
supernes|1 month ago
mpeg|1 month ago
Astro and Tanstack are probably the best full-stack routers these days, and Astro wins in terms of the wide support for almost any client-side tech
Imustaskforhelp|1 month ago
But to be really honest, thinking more about it. atleast from an "AI" bubble perspective, Cloudflare is pretty rock solid and isn't involved in the AI bubble deals whereas vercel has
If you were to use cloudflare workers say the past few months, you would've noticed some serious UI/UX improvements and its projects highlighted astro template was one of the first things (I think second was sveltekit iirc)
Anyways thinking about it now, I am sure that cloudflare must have been in talks with them for quite some time and they had the astro deployments on cloudflare workers so they must have seen its usage and other data we have no idea about to justify this purchase
That being said, I had been part of astro community almost exactly the time they had partnered up with turso (It was my holidays so I wanted to build a website from scratch, I sadly lost it but it was really cool and it had BMO from adventure time's pixel art that I lost oof :<)
So I was in their discord when they had just joined turso for astro DB and at that point, you couldn't host it locally (some tried with wasm) not sure what's the reality now though. But its interesting to see this because cloudflare offers a turso (serverless sqlite) alternative as Cloudflare D1, So we might see Astro shift to d1?
Once again, I have not been part of community for almost around 1-2 years so I don't know the current state of Astro aside from tweaking around making my own custom editor in bun for some astro templates (astro templates are really cool)
Perhaps, we are gonna see astro templates website + cloudflare workers to create an instant deployment of astro templates on cloudflare workers as a first class citizen. Honestly I would love that because cf workers/pages are free/cheapest in the whole market.
I hope that Astro still stays local first and still its serverless features can benefit everybody and not just cloudflare (looking at you vercel for nextjs)
Otterlord|1 month ago
chrisweekly|1 month ago
kylehotchkiss|1 month ago
Havoc|1 month ago
With these sort of combinations the deploy to cloudflare button gets ever bigger than over time. And then features get added that only work with CF and eventually it’s still open source but only half the stuff works standalone etc
That said - good for them.
tffarhad|1 month ago
827a|1 month ago
hexbin010|1 month ago
Congratulations!
stefanos82|1 month ago
My apologies friends, I could not resist!
Congrats Astro team!
endorphine|1 month ago
But do such acquihires usually result in higher salaries for regular (non-leadership) employees or? Also, what about NSOs?
jasona123|1 month ago
re5i5tor|1 month ago
[1] https://cto4.ai
re5i5tor|1 month ago
[2] https://github.com/cto4ai/cto4ai-blog
mmarian|1 month ago
GutenYe|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
tin7in|1 month ago
Given what agents can do, I feel a lot of the sites built on Webflow, Framer and so on will move to code and Astro is a great framework for this.
cdrnsf|1 month ago
pier25|1 month ago
If you want some precedent look at Hono. Initially it was just for the CF Workers runtime (not developed by CF). Then CF started using Hono internally and hired the dev to work on Hono full time. Hono works on any JS runtime.
https://hono.dev/docs/concepts/web-standard
mb2100|1 month ago
With [Mastro], we have a different approach. The name originally stood for "minimal Astro", and we’re staying true to that. At just ~700 lines of TypeScript, Mastro will always be easily maintainable – even if by just a single person. And it's amazing how much you can do if you're very deliberate in your API's design.
[Mastro]: https://mastrojs.github.io/
naiv|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
quentindanjou|1 month ago
azangru|1 month ago
bot_user_7a2b99|1 month ago
promiseofbeans|1 month ago
jcmfernandes|1 month ago
pousada|1 month ago
Unironically have been migrating my static pages (from Nextjs and Eleventy) to plain HTML and love it. Of course depends on your use case if that is feasible.
hydroxideOH-|1 month ago
https://micahcantor.com/blog/rsc-rewrite.html
evantbyrne|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
Then one is pretty much safe from framework tides.
gulugawa|1 month ago
porker|1 month ago
There's one other I've seen recently that looked good but I have misplaced the link
arcanemachiner|1 month ago
There's even an article about it somewhere.
azangru|1 month ago
But why are you looking for alternatives already?
dvcoolarun|1 month ago
ramon156|1 month ago
akmittal|1 month ago
bobnamob|1 month ago
shibel|1 month ago
saltytostitos|1 month ago
weli|1 month ago
fnoef|1 month ago
sieep|1 month ago
adzm|1 month ago
slfreference|1 month ago
Strongbad536|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
bigblind|1 month ago
suyash|1 month ago
ndsipa_pomu|1 month ago
ramesh31|1 month ago
wahnfrieden|1 month ago
koakuma-chan|1 month ago
Who is this framework for?
It's been years, and they still don't support unit testing Astro Actions. They still don't support inter-island communication.
"Astro v6 is around the corner" - and the only changes are 1. refactored CLI (why? it's perfectly fine) 2. bumped zod to v4
It's great if you want to build a blog or something, but it's definitely far from great for building apps.
Don't know what they are thinking.
drawfloat|1 month ago
They even say it in this blog:
"Our mission to design a web framework specifically for building websites — what we call content-driven websites, to better distinguish from data-driven, stateful web applications — resonated"
monooso|1 month ago
Not an Astro expert, but the massive headline at the top of the homepage may provide a clue as to their intended audience:
> The web framework for content-driven websites
mpeg|1 month ago
You can easily add any global store library to your project to communicate between islands from the very simple (nanostores) to more complex stuff (are people still using mobx, redux, etc?)
I actually would prefer if Astro kept the core more simple, I never understood the point of Astro components for example; always thought their game plan would be to build their own client-side framework like what remix v3 is doing, but currently their components are too limited to make them worth using over just doing everything in react, svelte, or whatever floats your boat.
pier25|1 month ago
The docs show how to use nanostores but you can use other libs like vue refs, etc.
https://docs.astro.build/en/recipes/sharing-state-islands/
CharlieDigital|1 month ago
philipwhiuk|1 month ago
guihubie|1 month ago
frivx|1 month ago
efilife|1 month ago
alexpadula|1 month ago
endorphine|1 month ago
Are these numbers supposed to provide any sense of the popularity if you're not often looking at npm trends?
angelfangs|1 month ago
MarkusAllen|1 month ago
Aurornis|1 month ago
It’s noteworthy because this comment is currently the top voted comment, probably because it hits all the notes of what you’d get if you asked an LLM to generate some content to tap into anger in a Hacker News comment section. It’s scary that this type of LLM powered engagement bait is so successfully being used to advertise on HN.
furyofantares|1 month ago
yellow_lead|1 month ago
MagicMoonlight|1 month ago
idopmstuff|1 month ago
John7878781|1 month ago
mp05|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
Only in dreams, it took off thanks to the likes of IBM that decided it was a way to save costs on their UNIX development efforts, many key projects have been founded thanks to Red-Hat Enterprise licenses, nowadays also part of IBM.
GCC, clang, GNOME, Linux kernel, systemd, CUPS, AMD/NVidia drivers, have plenty of big corp money.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
"1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux."
nindalf|1 month ago
The whole story (https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/) is fascinating, but here are a couple of interesting excerpts:
> I scrambled around and came up with some pricing strategy. [Motorola] wanted some enhancements to it so it could go in their phones, and I gave them a quote and at the time, I thought this was a quote for all the money in the world. It was just huge. ($80k)
> [Nokia] flew me over and said, “Hey, yeah, this is great. We want this but we need some enhancements.” I [Richard Hipp] said, “Great,” and we cut a contract to do some development work for them.
> We were going around boasting to everybody naively that SQLite didn’t have any bugs in it, or no serious bugs, but Android definitely proved us wrong. Look, I used to think that I could write software with no bugs in it. It’s amazing how many bugs will crop up when your software suddenly gets shipped on millions of devices.
If you can find paying customers that can fund your development, then it's fantastic. It's even better if those contracts give you scale that none of your competitors have. You don't need VC money if that's the case. But let's not pretend that Astro were in that situation. No one was paying for a web framework.
troyvit|1 month ago
European Commission issues call for evidence on open source
The EU is looking for facts like this as it figures out how to use OS to begin to extend its digital sovereignty. I don't think it's as simple as, "get funding from a giant continental government instead of VCs!" but what I hope is that there is a structure the EU and Open Source can forge together that gives OS software the funding it needs to build more Nginxes and SQLites in a way that fosters the independence of those projects along with the independence of the entities that use it.
jlarocco|1 month ago
Modern expectations that a VC pumps in millions (or billions) of dollars and then extracts 10s of billions a few years later is an unrealistic expectation for most companies, and forcing everything into that model is killing off a lot of projects that could be successful on a smaller scale. The pressure forces small companies to sell out to bigger corporations, consolidating the industry into a few huge players who gate keep and limit competition and choice.
philipallstar|1 month ago
Many, many people working on Linux work for companies that pay them to work on Linux. Linux is not, and I don't believe has ever claimed to be, community-funded.
Nginx was bought, a couple of times maybe, so they have had cash injections of some sort.
> We need more ways to fund infrastructure that don't require artificial monetization timelines.
Funding infrastructure isn't the problem, exactly. VC is for a specific type of funding: risky businesses that need scale to make money. We have found the answer: VCs, who are willing to lose all their money on your project.
unknown|1 month ago
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nonethewiser|1 month ago
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PKop|1 month ago
> I fully admit using Ai as my editor
No one enjoys reading AI slop. It has 0 value, and it's a huge turnoff on forums like this. You should stop doing it.
strangescript|1 month ago
maximgeorge|1 month ago
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ziemann|1 month ago
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MORPHOICES|1 month ago
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lupefiasko|1 month ago
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isodev|1 month ago
etchalon|1 month ago
We all lose while they all tell us we're winning.