We've Been Rewritten!

March 2, 2025
Last Updated: March 3, 2025

Tldr; I went on a coffee binge and rewrote the entire site in Go instead of Sveltekit.

At the time of writing, the only functioning components of the site are the front page, progress meters, and the posts. While posts are new, the account system has not been rewritten yet. Instead of focusing on a feature complete rollout, I’m publishing what I got and going from there. Based on the existing database, there is not a single user besides me, so this functionally impacts no one!

Here’s a full list of the broken features:

I’ll have to implement them in that order (sans-registration), so I don’t expect the rewrite to be “done” until later in March.

EDIT: Wow, turns out that writing something in a language you know and love means you work a lot faster.

But Why?

Instead of using a service like SquareSpace, Shopify, or any other website builder, I’ve written my own site from scratch and run it in Fly.io’s infra. While it might be far more work at first and as time goes on, I have full control over the site and its features. There is no “pay more for X!” or “you must use our product Y to do Z” for me to deal with.

Oh, and Fly.io is ridiculously cheap compared to the alternatives at ~$3 per month for me.

That explains why I wrote it myself, but why Go over Sveltekit?

Sveltekit requires a bunch of shenanigans to do what I want. It’s designed for a specific, but common, usecase, and what I want to do falls outside of that. An example is these posts. These blog posts are markdown files that are embeded in the server itself. To do this in Sveltekit, I’d have to include the files alongside the server then write a plugin to read, parse, and render the posts. To do that in a way that doesn’t tank performance, I’d have to write some clever little stuff to only ever read the files once. In Go, they’re already loaded into memory and therefore don’t ever need to touch the filesystem.

Along with that, Go is generally a vastly more performant language than TypeScript (the language SvelteKit uses). While my server costs are currently very cheap, the Sveltekit version will take ~10x to 100x the amount of resources to serve the same amount of traffic. While not a problem now, I don’t want to deal with that problem in the future.

Peace out,
~Raine