
1. Installing Hugo, and the Empty Build That Exits 0
Hugo installed in 7.86 seconds and rebuilt our site in 4 ms. Its first build also wrote zero HTML files and reported success, and that was the first of four silent failures.
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Hugo installed in 7.86 seconds and rebuilt our site in 4 ms. Its first build also wrote zero HTML files and reported success, and that was the first of four silent failures.

We moved our own 128 published articles into Hugo and got clean builds in under 100 ms. The obvious route also rewrote code blocks in 8 of them, turning shell comments into headings, and exited 0.

Our 50,000 page Hugo build took 86 seconds until we moved one where filter into a cached partial, and then it took 16. We also fed it bad input on purpose: five of eight mistakes built with exit 0.

Hugo built our 10,000 article site in 2.45 seconds to Eleventy's 4.8 and won at every size we tried. It also used nearly twice the memory, and 17 of its last 42 releases flagged something breaking, deprecated or removed.