Switch to using Astro / Starlight about documentation HOT 2 CLOSED

Moving from ReadTheDocs to Docusaurus was already a significant effort. The reasons we chose Docusaurus are threefold;

1. it's field tested, and used by tons of extremely popular resources and websites, not even Facebook (the creators) is the most well-known user. I have never heard of Astro/Starlight, and while they have some relatively high-end sponsors (Google, NordVPN, The Guardian, Trivago), they don't seem to be a well-known team themselves, making it a difficult decision to move to a product designed by a team with not much (publically documented) history behind them
2. It's much simpler in maintenance and updating than ReadTheDocs was, which does not seem to be the case for Starlight. It's a much more involved configuration, involving juggling various third-party plugins to get basic behaviour working, and dealing with dependency hell when a plugin you want isn't compatible with the version you have... not a problem we encounter at all with Docu.
3. Performance isn't a concern for us. It's documentation. It's not like the page loading 0.003 seconds faster is going to make or break somebody's project. The longest loading time I had on docs.neoforged.net was 218 milliseconds - practically instant, for the purpose of having a huge block of text to spend 15 minutes reading through and testing things out. It's not a performance critical page.

Moving to Starlight at this stage (especially less than a day after releasing 1.20.2) would just be a huge waste of time, distracting us from more important things. Moving to it in the future, after all of this is sorted out, would just be spending time moving to a new framework with no real benefit to us - just creating more work in the future for no actual tangible benefit to the team or to the community.

Effectively; no. We have no reason to do this, and it has far more drawbacks than benefits, to everybody involved.

from documentation.

I understand, thank you for considering Astro/Starlight.

from documentation.