I love the speed of Hugo. Nothing compares. But I’ve yet to develop a good workflow for front-end assets. Essentially, I write css in Sass, use Browserify, and shudder at the idea of not compressing images. Before using Hugo I used Node based static site generators and Gulp integrated quite well. It’s too bad that Golang doesn’t have an equivelant build tool (though perhaps it one day will?). I’ve tried using Gulp with Hugo by having a src theme folder and building it to a production one which Hugo watches (as suggested in this post), And this works… but it makes the whole process a bit slower and, thus, takes away the primary thing I like about Hugo.
I’d be happy with some kind of pre- and post- generation steps that hugo could run for you (probably defined in the site config file), which would solve this problem - then you could run whatever. It wouldn’t make the javascript stuff any faster, but it would at least integrate nicely. Alternatively, whatever pipelining tools you use could also just call hugo themselves.