Princesseuh

Hello, I'm the maintainer of this. Let me know if you people have any questions / comments :)

We don't intend on removing support for the unified ecosystem, we on purpose made the Markdown processing pipeline pluggable so that it was possible for both to exists!

The vast majority of our users don't use any sort of unified plugins, so a pipeline that's faster (and about 100 deps leaner) felt like a better default.

If you are using every single feature Astro has, your code somehow goes through every single branch (of every single dependency), etc then yes, but that'd be a pretty far-fetched scenario!

In practice, our users typically comment quite positively on how little (if any) work major updates requires, and we offer pretty extensive upgrade guides, if that helps.

Love everything you do Steve, consider that I've done it for you

Yeah, the parts rewritten in Rust here as only parts of the bottleneck. A lot of it is still JavaScript (including the user's code!). If Astro was just .md -> HTML, it'd of course be much faster.

It was tough to create a plugin API that was both performant and intuitive. Especially since the library people were migrating from (remark/rehype) was very laissez-faire in regard to the data you have access to, visiting patterns, etc.

Crossing data between Rust and JS is inherently kinda slow (relatively), so there's a constant push and pull between flexibility and performance that's not always easy to reason about!

This was actually part of the reason I made the Rust markdown processing, the unified ecosystem is a lot of deps!

I still have some plans in this area that should reduce the overall count further, though.

It was partially that, but mostly the Vite version with the Rolldown bundling etc. We typically always need to do a major whenever Vite releases one because it tends to impact us a lot compared to other frameworks for various reasons.