Show HN: World's fastest website generator with scripting language and shell (opens in new tab)

I do worry that things like Lua/ExprTk etc. might scare people who just need a basic static website generator, as I think Nift should still be one of the easiest to use for basic html/css/js websites.

One thing I hope I've succeeded at is ensuring the barebones of a project is quite basic (check out what you get if you run `nsm init-html` in an empty directory if you try installing). If you want you can easily just use Nift's functionality for injecting/inputting content from files at build time then just use basic html/css/js/etc. for your website, while also aiming to be able to integrate with basically any other tool you could possibly want.

It is quite a bit of work to set up things from scratch, but as you identified it's hopefully quite easy to set up templates/boilerplate to be replicated for other projects. In that regard Nift attempts to be unopinionated.

I am not quite sure what you mean by separating markup from content either? The templating system is extremely flexible with how you can lay your files out, inject content from basically wherever etc..

The primary goal of Nift is still generating websites but not just static ones (and at scale, can handle generating websites with millions of pages). For generating websites you can manage projects and generate them. The best way to learn about this are probably the tutorials (https://nift.dev/resources/tutorials.html) which will both point you towards template website repositories you can fork and clone to make websites with, but also initialise a basically empty project using `nift init-html` and give you an idea of how to manage, edit, build etc. a project (you could also use Nift for things like making research papers/books with pandoc, as a pre-processor for any programming language, etc.).

Nift has its own template language n++ to use in the template/content files used to build webpages (you can use it for generating css/scss/js/ts/etc. files as well), though you can also use other template languages combined with n++ as well.

Due to being a template language, doing any actual programming related tasks with n++ is a bit verbose, so using very similar syntax and essentially the same underlying code I added a scripting language called f++. The main purpose for adding f++ was for use with Nift as a website generator, but it works fine as its own scripting language as well, and the f++ REPL works very well as a shell extension (if one installs Nift, start the shell with `nsm sh` and you should be able to use it basically the same as your normal shell, but you also have a full type system, everything from f++, Lua embedded, ExprTk embedded for mathematical expressions, etc. etc.), for example see the other comment on this post from me with a link to an f++ script and a bash script where they do the same thing and the f++ script takes 3 seconds whereas the bash script takes 3 minutes!

If anyone is interested in learning more about Nift or having a play, feel free to email me (contact[at]n-ham.com).