Exciting news. And now the theme maintainers will have one less thing to worry about (all the checklist items for themes that use Hugo Pipes) 
Not really. A theme needs to work with the Basic version of Hugo in my not so humble opinion.
There are those of us who do not rely on SCSS/PostCSS in their workflows.
Ah, good point
What’s the difference? The Hugo build process is exactly the same.
I can think of one now that @alexandros brought this up.
Say I’m on Windows 32 bit (which doesn’t have extended version available) and I want to use a theme that was made with Hugo Pipes. I’d be out of luck to run/test my site locally.
Ah okay. I didn’t think the extended version wouldn’t be available on a platform such as Windows. I don’t believe there should be a regular and extended release at all. Extended should be built statically and available everywhere.
I wonder why Windows 32bit doesn’t have extended but I guess that’s a different discussion.
Thanks for providing more info.
There are various issues with the above that’s why it was not implemented. See the following:
All three of those Issues show why static would be better than dynamic.
The only two real issues I’ve seen are:
- Larger binaries - this is a minor issue. I would think most people won’t complain/be prohibited from using Hugo.
- Possible security vulnerabilities - This is a fair thought but the larger attack vector is in the number of modules Hugo already pulls in on the Go side. Aside from this past month, Hugo is updated fairly frequently, more so than almost any other tool I use, so personally I’m not worried about the delay in time to deliver a fix.
I assume Hugo extended needs libc in the first place because of SASS support right? And if one day there’s a SASS library written in pure Go, then maybe we can avoid this issue entirely?
The extended version requires a C++ build chain for the target platform (unless you want to implement SASS support in native Go). I spent 2 long working days to get a build setup for 3 OSes (Windows 64 bit, macOS and Linux). And that is the OSes I can easily test on.
This thread reminds me of of this tweet:
It shouldn’t.
No one is shouting, at least I’m not. We’re having a discussion on dynamic/static libs and how themes requiring SASS support could hinder some users. We all really appreciate the work you do @bep.
Good news! Thanks to Netlify for making this, makes working with Hugo a bit easier on their platform.
Seems to work fine for me too, although total deploy time is a bit slower (1:54 versus 1:06) but everything else is the same. 
Nice @Jura.
My apologies for taking this thread off topic. Do let it be known I’m thankful to Netlify team and Bep (and the many contributors) for all their hard work. 