Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#1

Post by merqurio » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 6:14 AM UTC

Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components
lit.dev

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#2

Post by zacian » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:07 AM UTC

Lit is amazing, I'm a big fan of Astro for using it as static websites, blogs, etc., but Lit would've been the second choice if not Astro.

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#3

Post by epolanski » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

Great project but I can't stand syntax such as decorators.

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#4

Post by mdhb » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:33 AM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #3

Great project but I can't stand syntax such as decorators.

They are optional for what it’s worth. They are also landing in standard JS soon.

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#5

Post by mdhb » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:35 AM UTC

Hands down the most underrated front end library out there. It powers some major projects like ChromeOS, Chrome Devtools, I think most of Firefox’s UI, Photoshop for the web, MDN etc.

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#6

Post by mdhb » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:40 AM UTC

I just came across this resource the other day and found it super helpful, thought I would share it here for anyone who’s interested in working with Lit.

https://lit.dev/articles/lit-cheat-sheet/

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#7

Post by Klaster_1 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:41 AM UTC

mdhb wrote: post #4

epolanski wrote: post #3

Great project but I can't stand syntax such as decorators.

They are optional for what it’s worth. They are also landing in standard JS soon.

The proposal is stuck at stage 3. AFAIK, to proceed to stage 4, it needs two independent implementations, but Firefox [0] and Chromium [1] didn't see any progress in this area for about a year. Personally, after working with Angular for many years, that's not a language feature I am looking forward to.

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1781212

[1] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/42202709

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#8

Post by kavaruka » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:52 AM UTC

I have been using Lit in production for 3 years now. I think it is the best abstraction over the web components API out there.

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#9

Post by troupo » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:55 AM UTC

The evolution of lit is fascinating to watch because it's built and promoted by people with rather visible and public dislike of everything React. And yet, it's already turned into React-lite.

- Custom HTML-like syntax

- Custom Javascript rules

    // valid JS, invalid lit
    const tagName= "a";
    
    `Some link`

- Custom rules for special functions.

    // classMap looks like a regular JS function, but it's not.
    // Both of these will produce an error
    
    Static and dynamic

    Static and dynamic

- Context https://lit.dev/docs/data/context/

- Experimental compiler: https://github.com/lit/lit/tree/main/packages/labs/compiler#...

Re: Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

#10

Post by skrebbel » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 7:57 AM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #3

Great project but I can't stand syntax such as decorators.

Just to add to a sibling comment, they are optional and not in a “optional but if you dont use them it really sucks” kind of way.

The Lit authors tried hard to use vanilla JS everywhere they could, and it shows.