Why a Rust CLI?

The zfb CLI is written in Rust and shipped as a single static binary. That choice is deliberate, and it is not a religious one.

A site builder spends most of its wall-clock time on three things: file system traversal, watching files for changes, and shelling out to small helper processes. All three benefit from a runtime with predictable startup, no install step, and no dependency on the user's local Node version. A Rust binary gets all of that for free, and the user does not need to think about which package manager pulled it down.

The flip side is the rendering pipeline itself, which is decidedly not Rust. Pages render through a JavaScript runtime so authors can keep using Preact, JSX, and the rest of the npm ecosystem. The split is intentional: the orchestrator is Rust, the renderer is JS, and the seam between them is small enough to keep honest.