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

First poster: bot
Why do ARM chips have an instruction with Javascript in the name (FJCVTZS)?. FJCVTZS is “Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fix...
New
finner
Some resources for Spring Home of Spring Spring Initializr Head First Spring with Reactor
New
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
New
EngineerHamziey
Hello everyone, is there a website or app that I can use to improve my self Like where there are UI UX designs to practice with and then...
New
mtmattei
A few months ago, Uno Platform unveiled Uno Platform for Figma plugin, a plugin created to turn your high-fidelity Figma design into XAML...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background I am trying to recycle myself and improve my knowledge about Phoenix. With 1.7 now out, this seems like a good opportunity. ...
New
riyajohnson
When it comes to selecting a framework for a development project, it’s crucial to make an informed decision. With so many options availab...
New
DevynClark
Front-end Developer Griffin, USA As a student in college looking for a way to break into Front-end Web Development, the rise of things s...
New

Other popular topics Top

Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
husaindevelop
Inside our android webview app, we are trying to paste the copied content from another app eg (notes) using navigator.clipboard.readtext ...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
First poster: AstonJ
Jan | Rethink the Computer. Jan turns your computer into an AI machine by running LLMs locally on your computer. It’s a privacy-focus, l...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New