malloryerik

malloryerik

Svelte - what do you think about it?

Any thoughts on Svelte?

Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser , Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app.

Instead of using techniques like virtual DOM diffing, Svelte writes code that surgically updates the DOM when the state of your app changes.

Most Liked

dorgan

dorgan

I’ve used it, both svelte and sapper.
My opinions:


The good:
It’s reactivity works well, you get used to the special syntax bits very quickly, so don’t be afraid of it.

Overall it’s quite fast, both for those synthetic benchmarks(look at how I render a million dom nodes with my library instead of using canvas!) and for real use cases.

It comes with a state management solution(stores), animations and transitions out of the box.

Sapper makes sense, and is a fast and quite batteries included solution for both SPA and SSR. You can get an decent SPA with SSR website up and running in a couple minutes. Handling cookies can be a bit confusing at first, though.

It’s relatively easy to integrate with other js libraries, I wrote some bindings for prosemirror while learning it and it worked quite fine.


The bad:
It’s output doesn’t work in legacy edge nor older browsers(try to see any NYT article featuring Rich Harris visualisations on an older browser, it just doesn’t load).

There’s no way to access child nodes. If you want to wrap individual childs(say, receive a list of components and wrap each of them in some other component, like you would do with special list items), you can’t.
For example, I created a ListStream component that imitates discourse’s cloaking behaviour(unmount out of screen dom nodes), and I had to pass the list items as a prop for the ListStream to wrap them, which is a horrible workaround in my opinion.
There was a discussion about that in the svelte’s discord when this article was published and there was no solution. Responses from contributors were too defensive from my pov(part of that was valid: the medium article wasn’t particularly good, but it had valid criticism on svelte’s lack of reflection) and ranged from “yes you can” or “why would you do that”, but no examples of how is it possible was given, and it was proven to be impossible.

That discussion and Rich’s responses in his Why I don’t use web components article, where people addressed his criticisms and he replied with snarky comments or refused to continue the discussion left me with a bitter taste. I would like to see more transparency and discussions about svelte’s weak points too, so they can be addressed properly.

Typescript support was bad a couple months ago, though it is supposed to improve sometime in the future.


Overall it’s very good, and it’s worth trying out.

I’m not currently using it though, since I want to render as much html as possible with Elixir Phoenix and custom elements are more suitable for that usecase.

fzngagan

fzngagan

We’re at an opposite end of the spectrum working with Ember.js. Kinda maximalists :wink:

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Sadly never worked with it – just heard a lot of good feedback from JS devs.

It’s kind of like Rust for JS, meaning that it compiles to “native” JS without you having to carry the framework with you. Which I quite like.

Where Next?

Popular Frontend topics Top

malloryerik
Any thoughts on Svelte? Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue...
New
AstonJ
Here’s a pretty good list of them: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS What’s your favou...
New
AstonJ
Inspired by @dbernheisel’s post here, which CSS framework do you use and why?
New
New
First poster: bot
hlang in 30 Seconds hlang (the h language) is a revolutionary new use of WebAssembly that enables single-paridigm programming without any...
New
mafinar
I (re-)realized I had the book “Modern CSS with Tailwind” bought, never read a page of it until today. With me being a fast reader and th...
New
SynergyRob
I invented a game of double Chess called Synergy Chess. I am not a coder. I hired someone to write the program. People can play online fo...
New
NKTgLaw
Introduction The NKTg Law on Varying Inertia describes the tendency of an object in motion depending on its position, velocity, and mass...
New
max_alyokhin
I created a web-synthesizer that generates sound from the binary code of any files. It can synthesize sound directly in the browser, or b...
New
toollist
Hey folks, Wanted to share a Chrome extension I’ve been using for Instagram data collection, and also open up a discussion about one of ...
New

Other popular topics Top

ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
AstonJ
We have a thread about the keyboards we have, but what about nice keyboards we come across that we want? If you have seen any that look n...
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build modern server-driven web applications using htmx. Whatever programming language you use, you’ll write less (and cleaner) code. ...
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
New
AstonJ
Curious what kind of results others are getting, I think actually prefer the 7B model to the 32B model, not only is it faster but the qua...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use advanced functional programming principles, practical Domain-Driven Design techniques, and production-ready Elixir code to build scal...
New