It isn't immediately obvious to me why a small Go static site generator would require "massive amounts of time" to run its tests, so it's hard to answer what yo

It isn't immediately obvious to me why a small Go static site generator would require "massive amounts of time" to run its tests, so it's hard to answer what you're doing wrong. Are your tests perhaps just too darned big? You don't, in general, need to render 5000 pages of something to test your template doesn't crash or something. It could also just be disk access. Consider trying an in-memory file system, or if you're on linux, look at using /dev/shm which is a RAM disk. It is also possible you've snuck in a quadratic or worse time algorithm. There's nothing fundamental to the problem of a static site generator that would require such algorithms, but speaking from experience it is an environment where it's easy to loop over the return value of one function, which itself loops over something other function (quite likely the same data), which itself loops over the same structure, and it's easy to end up with O(n^3) or O(n^4) without realizing it. It's especially easy to end up with that being a "for each page" type of loop. Static site generation should be O(n), give or take small factors (maybe O(n log n) for some things technically, but at a scale where O(n log n) is practically O(n) anyhow).