That Randy Brown

On Wanting it All

I recently started a new project, or set of projects, and in doing that, also returned to one of my perpetual searches for universal libraries. It used to be that expo basically solved for this problem for me, with its ability to ship app code to both native devices and web. Then, for the desktop use case, tauri filled the gap. This led me with a smaller decision criteria: pick an expo compatible UI component library, build, and ship.

However, my current project comes with a complication: I need to build a website. Not a web app, but a static website. I love eleventy for its ability to ship 0 javascript, but it isn't compatible with react libraries. I'm learning now that the react ecosystem is something of a poisoned well when it comes to building static sites. So much of the styling concerns are managed at runtime rather than build time now, that large swaths of the ecosystem aren't ready for site generation.

I was hoping to use Astro for this static site, but it seems like there's lots of compatibility issues even between darling tamagui and Astro. It seems that the current decision frame is either choosing a component library and working with what tools and frameworks are compatible with it, or picking the frameworks that make the most sense for the build and potentially being stuck with multiple component libraries.

Worst of all, this decision might force me to use next.