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Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

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Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#61

Post by MrJohz »

zuck_vs_musk wrote: post #27

Has anyone used both Solid and Vue? How do the two compare?

Both use signal-based reactivity, both are heavily optimised at compile-time to ensure only the parts of your app that need to well change at runtime.

Vue uses single-file components, SolidJS uses JSX. That has a surprisingly large influence on how you develop with the frameworks, because it's a lot easier to create new components if those components are just regular Javascript functions, as opposed to being new files with boilerplate. But the boilerplate also provides some standardisation which might be useful for larger teams.

Vue has a much larger ecosystem. Partly that's about pre-built components and utilities, but it's easy enough to build things yourself in both frameworks, and SolidJS in particular makes it very easy to incorporate vanilla JS libraries when necessary. However, if you've got a weird setup, it's more likely that someone in the Vue ecosystem has tried out that setup before and either documented it or raised all the necessary bug tickets to get it working.

Personally, I really like SolidJS - it's pretty small, it's very simple to understand once you've got your head around signals, and it scales up well from single interactive elements on a page to complicated applications. (Specifically: one project I work on at the moment is an Excel-esque application where SolidJS handles both the UI and the underlying reactivity of the application. I have only needed to think about performance in a couple of cases, the vast majority of the time, SolidJS can handle hundreds of thousands of cells without issues.)

That said, if you're working with newer developers or on a larger team, or if you're new to web development yourself, I'd probably recommend Vue just because there's so many more resources out there for it.

Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#62

Post by bpev »

dkh wrote: post #53
mightyham wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found the ecosystem to be perfectly serviceable for every complex piece of functionality I needed to bring in: remote state, forms, tables, and routing, come to mind. Complex state management can easily be handled using the library's standard reactive primitives and the community "solid primitives" project has a ton of well made utilities so you don't have to reinvent the wheel for common use cases. I'm not goin…

Cool. I am a bit of a minimalist (one reason I've never felt the most comfortable with React compared to some other things) and equally not interested in bloat and differing opinions/principles from using component libraries for everything (and I almost never use them for UI) but, yeah, I also don't want to have to write my own high-performance basics. A few years ago when using Vue for something, I had to detour a l…

For what it's worth, ecosystem is a valid concern, esp compared to React, and esp if dealing with more niche features. Even for something fairly generic like Virtual List implementations. Virtual Lists do exist for solid (specifically tanstack is the most fully-featured, albeit under-documented), they aren't as battle-hardened or as well-documented as their react counterparts. Specifically, I have thought about digging into VirtualList internals, because of a couple issues that I haven't seen in some other framework impls (granted, of most the complex generic ui components, virtual-list is literally the one issue I had with ecosystem).

Also, you'll definitely start seeing edges faster. Things like touch event libraries, animation libraries, maplibre/dataviz/etc. I'd say that the solid ecosystem is at the point where you'll see 1-2 libraries for most things, but if those libraries aren't quite right for you, you can very quickly find yourself digging deeper than you'd like.

That being said, as parent stated, integrating vanilla libs isn't so hard. And also, there is a... solid... amount of people building headless libraries specifically for the ecosystem, which are quite useful (For example, I recently came across https://corvu.dev, which I've started integrating here and there). What I mean to say is less that solid has a poor ecosystem, and more that there isn't the infinite easy-access vibe-code-able pop-in-lib-to-solve-your-problem ecosystem of react.

Even with the shallow ecosystem, solidjs has been quite enjoyable to me. Also, in the two years I've been using it, I think I've built up enough of my own personal ecosystem that I don't really need to reach towards external dependencies all that much, which feels very nice.

Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#63

Post by sensiblecarrot7 »

math wrote: post #57
mightyham wrote: post #2

Having used Solid on a largish web product for over a year, I am thoroughly convinced and will not be returning to React in the future. This is somewhat of an aside: I am aware that the creator of Solid has long been experimenting with adding laziness to the reactive system. I think it would be a mistake. That everything is immediate keeps state changes intuitive, fairly easy to debug, and is one of the strong points…

I'm using SolidJS for Infumap ( https://github.com/infumap/infumap ), which is getting pretty big. Two main comments that come to mind: Because the state -> DOM mapping is non-trivial for my application, I ended up writing my own virtual DOM diffing code, a primary facet of React. I appreciate the ease of being able to circumvent this where it's not necessary and performance considerations dominate, though I admit i'…

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Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#64

Post by smt88 »

skeptrune wrote: post #50
afro88 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most importantly, it's just 1,823 well organized commits (1,329 of which belong to the creator). That gives me confidence to keep it around long term. Genuinely curious: why does a low number of commits, and mostly commits from one person, give you confidence to keep it around long term?

Low count suggests that the project has an intentionally built core and doesn't undergo churn or feature creep. It's also a good sign that commits per week have decreased substantially over time. Contributions being mostly from a single developer lends further credence to that idea, because it implies everything is fueled by one person's relatively opinionated vision and taste.

This conclusion is deeply divorced from reality.

A single(-ish) author is the strongest smell for a library. I've been burned countless times by a project's "BDFL" moving on to something else. Sometimes a new maintainer will take over, but it's rare.

Low commit count also suggests unresponsiveness to issues that are filed, especially for a TypeScript or JavaScript project.

This thread single-handedly convinced me not to start a Solid project.

Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#65

Post by steve_adams_86 »

mightyham wrote: post #2

Having used Solid on a largish web product for over a year, I am thoroughly convinced and will not be returning to React in the future. This is somewhat of an aside: I am aware that the creator of Solid has long been experimenting with adding laziness to the reactive system. I think it would be a mistake. That everything is immediate keeps state changes intuitive, fairly easy to debug, and is one of the strong points…

Is laziness intended to offer primitives for suspended UIs?

I haven’t used Solid for a while and can’t recall if there’s a Suspense counterpart already. If not, this seems like a reasonable feature to add. It’s a familiar and pretty intuitive convention

Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#66

Post by sensiblecarrot7 »

seabass wrote: post #58

It’s been an absolute joy to write Solid the last few years. After a workday of writing React, it always feels so liberating to come home to my personal solidjs code. When used with solid-primitives it feels very expressive and powerful. But mainly I think reactivity just jives with my mental model better than React’s top-down “rerender everything unless it’s a memo” approach. All that said, concerns about the solidj…

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Re: Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

#69

Post by loxs »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #67

svelte is far far superior to this. Instead of the verbose JSX or whatever that weird syntax is called, you literally write plain HTML in svelte and feels absolutely natural to do so

Funny. To me JSX is a much superior language compared to HTML templating. And I would say it's provably so. You can do JSX-in-JS-in-JSX recursively in a way that is "natural" and "safe" and "maintainable". And with TypeScript you get great IDE support, ability to refactor and whatnot.

No need to trust my word, just look at the huge amount of code in JSX that the world is maintaining at the moment.

I would say the only problem is the performance cost that we have to pay for this - the shadow DOM and (as a result) the hooks mess that we have in React. But it feels more like a problem that needs to be solved in order to use the much superior way of writing code (JSX). Not the other way around (sacrifice JSX for performance)

And I get that it can be overwhelming if you still haven't made the "jump", it just doesn't sound fair to criticize something that you don't understand.

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