Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 571 posts

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#141

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

sxiao wrote: post #118

Am I the only one? Next just bought its biggest upcoming competitor—SvelteKit. Next is the best that React has to offer but it still has flaws. Svelte and SvelteKit are so awesome you cannot believe it before you've built something bigger and so much ahead of the entire React ecosystem. We migrated a huge/complex React app in a month and the difference is night and day (performance/bundle size/dev productivity). Reac…

This is all that’s wrong with open source free software. You’re disappointed by how someone chooses to give you free stuff.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#142

Post by afavour »

sxiao wrote: post #138
ravenstine wrote: post #68

Awesome news! Having worked with frontend frameworks for years, I've grown pessimistic about them in general, but I'm enthusiastic about Svelte because it does so many things right that actually avoid a lot of the issues other frameworks claim to solve but actually make worse. Interacting with the Svelte compiler is ridiculously easy. Though the documentation can be improved, I found it trivial to import the Svelte c…

Why is this 'awesome news' for us devs, the market and competition if one vendor now controls all modern SSR frameworks plus significant parts of the tool chain (swc)?

Does Vercel actually “control” Svelte, though? The existing governance structure is untouched, they’re just paying the salary of the lead (and definitely not only) developer.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#143

Post by bdougherty »

rglover wrote: post #70
didip wrote: post #64

Can someone teach me how Svelte does what it does? The front page is not telling me much? How does it "surgically" update the DOM? Why is it better than virtual DOM?

Surgical = "It checks a diff of what the component rendered before an update vs. after and then only patches or updates the parts of the DOM that need to be changed (as opposed to replacing the entire DOM, which is slow)." Similar to React. Svelte may not be using the exact same mechanisms but this is in the ballpark. Virtual DOM is just an in-memory representation of the DOM that describes which child elements (e.g.…

There is no diff going on with Svelte. And there doesn't need to be an in-memory representation of anything. Because it is compiling the code, it knows exactly what will change and in response to what.

https://svelte.dev/repl/7161f10f8eb645d8984fb231a0bc3982?ver...

For example in that repl, you can see that it makes a call to `$$invalidate` when the input value changes (see `input_input_handler()`) which triggers a `set_data` call (see `p()`) to update just the textNode that contains the name. This is what is meant by surgical. No other work is done other than what is required to update the specific places where a variable is used.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#144

Post by sxiao »

leerob wrote: post #19
gavinray wrote: post #15

Well, this is awesome -- but fuck me: Vue is the only major player not under the Vercel umbrella now, haha. Looks like I might have to phone in half a decade of experience. Svelte is close enough to Vue with "script setup" mode anyways, the major difference is whether your logic/keywords go INSIDE the HTML tags or OUTSIDE. Svelte doesn't support JSX/TSX though =(

Lee from Vercel here. The governance of Svelte isn't changing – it's still the same independent, open-source project and community. We're just supporting Rich and helping the project grow!

> The governance of Svelte isn't changing

This is the standard narrative when OSS contributors got hired but ok, I'd write the same.

But then just tell us what was the motivation of Vercel's shareholders and CEO to acquire Rich for such a high price (he is the compensation and ESOP you pay absolutely worth) but what's your gain? "Just supporting Rich and helping the project grow" or just buying him out of the market?

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#145

Post by sxiao »

afavour wrote: post #142
sxiao wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this 'awesome news' for us devs, the market and competition if one vendor now controls all modern SSR frameworks plus significant parts of the tool chain (swc)?

Does Vercel actually “control” Svelte, though? The existing governance structure is untouched, they’re just paying the salary of the lead (and definitely not only) developer.

Not sure if this topic is worth our time to debate. There are millions of ways of subtly controlling/influencing entities. And it's much easier if you pay money, ESOP and pay even more money if future goals and exits come alive.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#146

Post by [deleted] »

sxiao wrote: post #138
ravenstine wrote: post #68

Awesome news! Having worked with frontend frameworks for years, I've grown pessimistic about them in general, but I'm enthusiastic about Svelte because it does so many things right that actually avoid a lot of the issues other frameworks claim to solve but actually make worse. Interacting with the Svelte compiler is ridiculously easy. Though the documentation can be improved, I found it trivial to import the Svelte c…

Why is this 'awesome news' for us devs, the market and competition if one vendor now controls all modern SSR frameworks plus significant parts of the tool chain (swc)?

[deleted]

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#147

Post by rich_harris »

sxiao wrote: post #118

Am I the only one? Next just bought its biggest upcoming competitor—SvelteKit. Next is the best that React has to offer but it still has flaws. Svelte and SvelteKit are so awesome you cannot believe it before you've built something bigger and so much ahead of the entire React ecosystem. We migrated a huge/complex React app in a month and the difference is night and day (performance/bundle size/dev productivity). Reac…

I understand this perspective! But as anyone who knows me will tell you, I would be the worst person in the world to try and build a business around Svelte. As others have said, the expectations from investors would make it far less likely that Svelte could remain a community-centric project.

It's important to clarify that Vercel (which has earned its open source bona fides) hasn't 'bought' Svelte or SvelteKit. It's more accurate to say that they're supporting Svelte's development by paying for a full time engineer to work on it. There's a healthy core team of developers who certainly won't relinquish _their_ independence because of _my_ career choices.

It's fair to be sceptical about all this! But I've had multiple conversations throughout this process where the importance of maintaining independence was expressed by both sides, and I truly believe this is the best outcome for Svelte and its community.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#148

Post by ahevia »

sxiao wrote: post #145
afavour wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Vercel actually “control” Svelte, though? The existing governance structure is untouched, they’re just paying the salary of the lead (and definitely not only) developer.

Not sure if this topic is worth our time to debate. There are millions of ways of subtly controlling/influencing entities. And it's much easier if you pay money, ESOP and pay even more money if future goals and exits come alive.

Wouldn't Vercel benefit from being the defacto platform to deploy Next & SvelteKit apps?

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#149

Post by sxiao »

cobertos wrote: post #87
ravenstine wrote: post #68

Awesome news! Having worked with frontend frameworks for years, I've grown pessimistic about them in general, but I'm enthusiastic about Svelte because it does so many things right that actually avoid a lot of the issues other frameworks claim to solve but actually make worse. Interacting with the Svelte compiler is ridiculously easy. Though the documentation can be improved, I found it trivial to import the Svelte c…

Ember was the first framework I used and also the most frustrating. At least with Vue and React I can poke at the internals and they make sense, but Ember's internals had so many oddities that thoroughly confused me.

This is so HN, in an Svelte thread memories from Ember (sharing your sentiments though).
Post reply on HN