Olive CSS: Lisp powered vanilla CSS utility-Class A la Tailwind

jjba23 13 points 10 comments April 22, 2026
codeberg.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (3 comments)

VPenkov

The comparison section says the MIT license is not "free" because it's not copyleft. How come is more permissive considered less free?

mudkipdev

> Output is too large: Disable unused breakpoints, variants, or colors in your build script. So instead of using tailwind, which automatically strips unused CSS classes, here you're supposed to manually remove anything you think you might not need by editing lisp code? Edit: I just took a look at one of the example projects listed, and sure enough it ships a 1 megabyte file called olive.min.css with every possible class: https://wikimusic.jointhefreeworld.org/css/wikimusic.olive.m... It's also heavily duplicated, searching for "blur-md" yields 12 entries all with the definition.

HiPhish

> written in Lisp (Guile Scheme) Doomed to obscurity. Look, I love Lisp like any other Lisper, but there is no proper Guile (let alone general Scheme) package manager, which means any Guile project will be be an uphill battle to maintain dependencies in. Oh well, at least it has a code of conduct, that has to count for something I guess? The fact of the matter is that there is just too much good stuff for the frontend in the NPM ecosystem, so you are going to depend on it sooner or later anyway unless you have a really simple website. So you might as well depend on it fully. I'm in the process of migrating my website from my own home-made static site generator (written in Common Lisp) to Astro for that very reason. The NPM ecosystem is a leaning tower of hacks on top of hacks and adapters for adapters, but it gets the job done. EDIT: I should also point out that on the frontend just making something work is not enough. There is all sorts of dark magic like bundling, minimizing and tree-shaking that you'll have to implement yourself. You can try if you want, but the tools in the NPM ecosystem already do all of that. Have fun re-inventing all of that, but I'm out.

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