A real design system, compiled here
USWDS is 605 stylesheets and about 800 KiB of Sass. The page holds
the whole tree in memory and resolves every @use
against it, because the compiler's filesystem is an interface the
caller supplies rather than std::fs.
Configuration, not overrides
The theme controls rewrite the @use … with (…) block
and recompile from source, so you get the stylesheet the framework
would have produced. This is not a layer of CSS pasted on top.
Reads have to be synchronous
The compiler asks for a file and gets bytes back, with nothing to
await. An import therefore cannot be fetched while compiling, so
the page loads each framework bundle up front. That constraint is
the reason the API takes a whole file map.
Fast enough to sit behind a slider
Bulma takes a second or two here and USWDS a handful, against
0.35 s and 1.5 s for the native binary on the same machine. The
compile is doing the full job each time, not a cached or partial
one, which is why the timing moves with the framework you pick.