Even though Hugo may not have the mindshare that Jekyll does, there's HUGE value in having a tool that's a single binary and works on Linux/osx/win and does not need to have 15 minutes of packages and dependencies .
I help maintain Jus [0], an opinionated static site generator with a focus on simplicity. It has only two commands - jus build compiles your files into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and jus serve spins up a local development server with live-reloading capabilities. There is no setup required, and jus understands a variety of input formats, including markdown, handlebars templates, sass, ES6 JavaScript with module imports.
One outstanding feature that I frequently use is that jus stores a bunch of metadata about the site in the global handlebars context. This means that things like filenames, data files, and per-page frontmatter are available in every template, making it easy to write dynamic lists or index pages.
FYI: Inspired by TodoMVC and HackerNewsPWA I've started a static site sample showcase [1] - one design, many sites [2]. So far samples include Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Nanoc, Metalsmith, Jigsaw 'n' more. Cheers.
[1] http://staystatic.github.io
[2] https://github.com/staystatic/staystatic
PS: Add your site! I add a new one every month for June it's all Python with Pelican [3] http://getpelican.com
Strong vote for Hugo. Discovered it via HN a month or two ago, very happy with it. Very responsive dev community both for the core project and for themes.
I wrote my own because I don't like magic, reading a lot of documentation, and I hate templates. Using server side rendering with React is great! https://github.com/kentor/tiny-ssg
I did the same for a blog, except I went with a mak/sed/awk/pandoc combo and got lightning fast incremental builds. Previously I was hexo (listed in the article), it took longer to start than the current solution takes to finish. What made me drop hexo though was the breakages every time I tried to checkout and run on a different computer.
I'm surprised Gatsby came out ahead of Phenomic.io among the ReactJS + JavaScript based static site generators. Having worked with both, Gatsby felt much too opinionated and idiomatic to me, while Phenomic felt much closer to what I would expect a static React site generator to feel like.
I wonder if it has to do with exposure. I see Kyle(the creator) everywhere (conference speaking and twitter to be specific) and it seems like it is the introduction static site generation with React even thought renderToStaticMarkup is built into the ReactDOM library
I've been able to get Django to serve pages in less than .2ms (cached), 1-2ms (partially uncached) or about 5ms-10ms (fully uncached) with things like materialized views, streaming HTTP, HTTP/2, and a bunch of other techniques.
Static sites can live on S3 which means never worrying about your server crashing (except for that one time!). It's really a stress free way of handling sites :-)
If you can use a static site generator then you also have the capability to spend the minimal time having a pretty good setup like nginx with cached WordPress. In which case both would likely survive HN.
And it runs blazingly fast.