Comment by cxr

It may be worth considering whether you need a native binary (and the ability to run it) for the job at all. A static site generator doesn't need to do anything that browsers from the last 10 years can't do; a static site generator is fundamentally a classic batch processing job that takes a collection of (mostly plain text) files as input, processes it, and then outputs something else (in this case, a collection of post-processed content for the site).

If you encode the transformations that your desired SSG should perform by writing the processing rules as plain text source code that a browser is capable of executing (i.e., an "HTML tool" or something adjacent[1][2]), then you can just publish this "static site generator" itself as yet another page on your static site.

To spell it out: running the static site generator to create a new post* doesn't need to involve anything more than hitting /new.html (or whatever) on the live site, clicking the button for the type=file input on that page, using the browser file picker to open the directory where the source to your static site lives, and then saving the resulting ZIP somewhere so the contents can be copied to whatever host you're using.

1. <https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/>

2. <https://crussell.ichi.city/pager.app.htm>

* in fact, there's nothing stopping you from, say, putting a textarea on that page and typing out your post right there, before the new build