Add “deep dive” guide to how Astro works technically

[delucis]

• What is the <astro-island> element?
• Why do we inline some scripts?
• How does bundling work?
• etc.

Probably fits into the “Explanation” quadrant if we’re thinking with the diátaxis model in mind: provides theoretical background information in a friendly tone (https://diataxis.fr/explanation/).

[sarah11918]

I suspect this is going to be on @FredKSchott 's (not @fredkbot ! I have to be careful now!) list to tackle, either as part of, or follow up to #893 .

[FredKSchott]

Yes!

[delucis]

If anyone wants to leave comments here for any “deep dive” content you wish was documented, please do! We’d love to know what folks are interested in hearing about how Astro works.

[wassfila]

(-)

• Many hardly get through the external API doc or even use its search feature, they don't care about the internals.
• Now some percentage (gut feeling less than 5%) want to reuse Astro in custom way
• explaining Astro needs to explain Vite, need to explain Rollup, need to explain npm packaging,...

(+)

• I think the Astro team, dev, support, contributors would highly appreciate this
• It took me ages to differenciate build flow from runtime flow
• when does my plugin run ?
• why do I run SSR while my imports despite being in the middle of the code, are fixed on build step ?
• How is the Astro compiler flow ? When is my component compiled, in ssg, ssr.
• when does each frontmatter run with encapsulated components ?
• Why are my env variables not available in config, why are they not available in imported .js, probably listing the different processes scope in an overview could could answer this

(+)
These non-intuitive points could have some dataflow diagrams that triggers aha on first view. These diagrams have ROI when core team explains Astro in conferences or interviews, also when projecting the future of Astro.

I wish I could contribute on this, this really needs more confidence in knowing the depth of Astro.

[delucis]

We suspect this is not going to happen any time so soon, so will close for now.