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Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

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

#191
post #88

I've been pretty skeptical about SPAs but having tried out Svelte for a few side projects, I have to admin I was probably directing my skepticism to the wrong thing, probably React was the cause of my dislike for SPAs. Svelte looks really awesome and the simplicity it brings back is invaluable. I really wish it takes off, for real. Looks very promising.

What bits were misdirected? What worries did you have?

The complexity and the over engineering going on, mostly.

Things such as redux, rxjs, observables, thunks, etc really put me off when you compare that to just MVC with Rails for example, plus most applications I worked with React were just forms anyway, with some fancy controls/widgets on top.

Not having a clear way, even today with Next, to load data (client side, without doing SSR) before a route transition happens (which leads to spinners everywhere), and now the solution seems to be all the server components, concurrent mode, suspense, etc, etc which to me is just mind blowing how complex things became.

Also hooks which conceptually they make a lot of sense and I like them, but then you have to do all the dependencies tracking manually, they have a lot of gotchas (async in useEffect, ordering, etc).

The "rerendering of everything" and the need for manual memo, useMemo, useCallback, etc and the whole "don't optimize it until you need it" (guess what, a my company as in many others it never was a product priority to make it fast).

Now, take the good parts of the approach, remove all these complications, and you have a very nice and clean approach to do web apps. To me that is what Svelte brings back.

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

#192
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

HAHAHA

I try not to go full HN, but sometimes you do.

And I shouldn't have made it about that. As I get older I the more I just get tired of extra things. There's always a price when you add more things. Svelte technically does add things, but I think it has better bang for its buck. The fact it doesn't pointlessly impose OOP constructs upon the end-developer is a big win for me.

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

#193

So I'm a backend engineering, but have experience with Vue.js and like it. Why would I want to rethink that and try out Svelte? Reading about svelte the main advantage seems to be everything building to raw JS making it faster. Questions: Is there typescript support? I would assume, but... Does this end up with smaller bundles/js files? Any other major advantages? From some reading syntax seems pretty similar to Vue…

1. Yes there is typescript support. 2. Compared to React yes, because Svelte ships no runtime (or at least a very minimal one). There is a curve though, and very large apps (in the hundreds of components) will eventually be overtaken by something like Preact or vue. 3. No runtime means no restrictions on what they include in the framework. They take full advantage of Svelte being a compiler and include things like co…

> They take full advantage of Svelte being...

They? Libraries?

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

#194
post #161
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…

We're all lucky that you got a polite, substantive reply, but please don't cross into personal attack like this in HN comments. It generally causes discussion quality to tank drastically. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

@dang, second reply and apologies, now I know what you mean, I edited some part away which you probably meant and which is still in quotes of others' comments. Sorry, I'll try to improve and thanks for the hint!

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

react native can definitely ship production ready applications that large teams work on. bundler problems arent even react native related.. theyre webpack/babel etc. Package management? how is that related to RN?

Because you never have to deal with that stuff in mobile apps unless you use react native? So sure maybe it’s not directly react native’s fault but it is an issue.

This thread initially started by me comparing Svelte to React.

React uses webpack usually, RN uses metro usually, you can use esbuild, swc, etc for either though.

Svelte is a web tech, and thus uses web bundlers like webpack, thus has the same "faults", though I'm not sure what specifically is being critiqued.

When comparing RN to other cross platform solutions like Flutter you're wanting to compare it's package manager / bundler to Metro and the native dependency systems such as Cocoapods.

Just wanted to clear that up.

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

#196

I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason. Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc. Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel? At least with React it i…

For all the use cases I deal with on a regular basis, Svelte looks more like vanilla HTML/JS than any equivalent React code.

And the reason these things change is because that's what needed changing. One of the topline features of Svelte is that is has less boilerplate than React, and it achieves that quite handily. Unless you're criticizing particular constructs in Svelte that are unjustifiably different, I don't think unfamiliarity is that damning a criticism.

Maybe I'm just used to switching up languages on a regular basis, but the idea of having to learn different language constructs for loops and the like doesn't seem that herculean of a task.

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

#197
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

HAHAHA I try not to go full HN, but sometimes you do. And I shouldn't have made it about that. As I get older I the more I just get tired of extra things. There's always a price when you add more things. Svelte technically does add things, but I think it has better bang for its buck. The fact it doesn't pointlessly impose OOP constructs upon the end-developer is a big win for me.

Yeah, Svelte is pure gold.

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

#199

I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason. Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc. Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel? At least with React it i…

The templating language is the easiest thing to learn. The hardest is architecture.

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

#200
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bits were misdirected? What worries did you have?

The complexity and the over engineering going on, mostly. Things such as redux, rxjs, observables, thunks, etc really put me off when you compare that to just MVC with Rails for example, plus most applications I worked with React were just forms anyway, with some fancy controls/widgets on top. Not having a clear way, even today with Next, to load data (client side, without doing SSR) before a route transition happens…

Oh, okay. Thank you for the explanation.

Yes. I totally agree with this. That's why I chose Vue as well. As I've gotten into it more I've found chunks that certainly feel over engineered here and there too.

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