I am probably just not smart enough to get it, but it reminds me of the constant seemingly pointless rewrites I see in companies. Figure out what works and keep it, is that so hard? Why can other languages do that. Is this just the nature of web dev?
People are looking for a satisfying non-leaky abstraction to build upon and they don't find it with web technologies. They get close, but those last few pieces never quite fit, and we lack the power to reshape the pieces, so we tear out all the pieces and try again. Maybe this next time we'll find a better way to fit them together.
Of course I hear plenty of people complaining that apps on top of hypertext is a fundamental mistake and so we can't expect it to ever really work, but the way you put it really made it click for me. The problem isn't that we haven't solved the puzzle, it's that the pieces don't actually fit together. Thank you.
Honestly, that's basically happened, but just a generation later.
Most modern frameworks are doing very similar things under the hood. Svelte, SolidJS, and modern Vue (i.e. with Vapor mode) all basically do the same thing: they turn your template into an HTML string with holes in it, and then update those holes with dynamic data using signals to track when that data changes. Preact and Vue without Vapor mode also use signals to track reactivity, but use VDOM to rerender an entire component whenever a signal changes. And Angular is a bit different, but still generally moving over to using signals as the core reactivity mechanism.
The largest differences between these frameworks at this point is how they do templating (i.e. JSX vs HTML vs SFCs, and syntax differences), and the size of their ecosystems. Beyond that, they are all increasingly similar, and converging on very similar ideas.
The black sheep of the family here is React, which is doing basically the same thing it always did, although I notice even there that there are increasing numbers of libraries and tools that are basically "use signals with React".
I'd argue the signal-based concept fits really well with the DOM and browsers in general. Signals ensure that the internal application data stays consistent, but you can have DOM elements (or components) with their own state, like text boxes or accordions. And because with many of these frameworks, templates directly return DOM nodes rather than VDOM objects, you're generally working directly with browser APIs when necessary.
This is all specific to frontend stuff, i.e. how do you build an application that mostly lives on the client. Generally, the answer to that seems to be signals* and your choice of templating system — unless you're using React, then the answer is pure render functions and additional mechanisms to attach state to that.
Where there's more exploration right now is how you build an application that spans multiple computers. This is generally hard — I don't think anyone has demonstrated an obvious way of doing this yet. In the old days, we had fully client-side applications, but syncing files was always done manually. Then we had applications that lived on external servers, but this meant that you needed a network round-trip to do anything meaningful. Then we moved the rendering back to the client which meant that the client could make some of its own decisions, and reduced the number of round trips needed, but this bloats the client, and makes it useless if the network goes down.
The challenge right now, then, is trying to figure out how to share code between client and server in such a way that
(a) the client doesn't have to do more than it needs to do (no need to contain the logic for rendering an entire application just to handle some fancy tabs).
(b) the client can still do lots of things that are useful (optimistic updates, frontend validation, etc
(c) both client and server can be modelled as a single application as opposed to two different ones, potentially with different tooling, languages, and teams
(d) the volatility of the network is always accounted for and does not break the application
And importantly here, I don't think anyone has solved these issues yet, even in older models of software. The reason this development is ongoing has nothing to do with the web platform (which is an incredible resource in many ways: a sandboxed mini-OS with incredibly powerful primitives), it's because it's a very old problem and we still need to figure out what to do about it.
* Or some other reactivity primitive or eventing system, but mostly signals.
We are running code on servers and clients, communicating between the two (crossing the network boundary), while our code often runs on millions of distributed hostile clients that we don't control.
It's inherently complex, and inherently hostile.
From my view, RSC's are the first solution to acknowledge these complexities and redesign the paradigms closer to first principles. That comes with a tougher mental model, because the problem-space is inherently complex. Every prior or parallel solution attempts to paper over that complexity with an over-simplified abstraction.
HTMX (and rails, php, etc.) leans too heavily on the server, client-only-libraries give you no accessibility to the server, and traditional JS SSR frameworks attempt to treat the server as just another client. Astro works because it drives you towards building largely static sites (leaning on build-time and server-side routing aggressively).
RSCs balance most of these incentives, gives you the power to access each of them at build-time and at run-time (at the page level or even the component level!). It makes each environment fully powerful (server, client, and both). And manages to solve streaming (suspense and complex serialization) and diffing (navigating client-side and maintaining state or UI).
But people would rather lean on lazy tropes as if they only exist to sell server-cycles or to further frontend complexity. No! They're just the first solution to accept that complexity and give developers the power to wield them. Long-term, I think people will come to learn their mental model and understand why they exist. As some react core team members have said, this is kind of the way we should have always built websites-once you return to first principles, you end up with something that looks similar to RSCs[0]. I think others will solve these problems with simpler mental models in the future, but it's a damn good start and doesn't deserve the vitriol it gets.
Meanwhile, sync engines seem to actually solve these problems - the distributed data syncing and the client-side needs like optimistic updates, while also letting you avoid the complexity. And, you can keep your server-first rendering.
To me it's a choice between lose-lose (complex, worse UX) and win-win (simpler, better UX) and the only reason I think anyone really likes RSC is because there is so much money behind it, and so little relatively in sync engines. That said, I don't blame people for not even mentioning them as they are newer. I've been working with one for the last year and it's an absolute delight, and probably the first genuine leap forward in frontend dev in the last decade, since React.
This isn't true, because RSCs let you slide back into classic react with a simple 'use client' (or lazy for pure client). So anywhere in the tree, you have that choice. If you want to do so at the root of a page (or component) you can, without necessarily forcing all pages to do so.
> which means its server-first model leads you to slow feeling websites, or lots of glue code to compensate
Again, I don't think this is true - what makes you say it's slow feeling? Personally, I feel it's the opposite. My websites (and apps) are faster than before, with less code. Because server component data fetching solves the waterfall problem and co-locating data retrieval closer to your APIs or data stores means faster round-trips. And for slower fetches, you can use suspense and serialize promises over the wire to prefetch. Then unwrapping those promises on the client, showing loading states in the meantime as jsx and data stream from the server.
When you do want to do client-side data fetching, you still can. RSCs are also compatible with "no server"-i.e. running your "server" code at build-time.
> To me it's a choice between lose-lose (complex, worse UX) and win-win (simpler, better UX)
You say it's worse UX but that does not ring true to my experience, nor does it really make sense as RSCs are additive, not prescriptive. The DX has some downsides because it requires a more complex model to understand and adds overhead to bundling and development, but it gives you back DX gains as well. It does not lead to worse UX unless you explicitly hold it wrong (true of any web technology).
I like RSCs because they unlock UX and DX (genuinely) not possible before. I have nothing to gain from holding this opinion, I'm busy building my business and various webapps.
It's worth noting that RSCs are an entire architecture, not just server components. They are server components, client components, boundary serialization and typing, server actions, suspense, and more. And these play very nicely with the newer async client features like transitions, useOptimistic, activity, and so on.
> Meanwhile, sync engines seem to actually solve these problems
Sync engines solve a different set of problems and come with their own nits and complexities. To say they avoid complexity is shallow because syncing is inherently complex and anyone who's worked with them has experienced those pains, modern engines or not. The newer react features for async client work help to solve many of the UX problems relating to scheduling rendering and coordinating transitions.
I'm familiar with your work and I really respect what you've built. I notice you use zero (sync engine), but I could go ahead and point to this zero example as something that has some poor UX that could be solved with the new client features like transitions: https://ztunes.rocicorp.dev
These are not RSC exclusive features, but they display how sync engines don't solve all the UX problems you're espousing they do without coordinating work at the framework level. Happy to connect and walk you through what a better UX for this functionality would look like.
Many of the features like transitions and all the new concepts are workaround you just don’t really need when your data is mostly local and optimistically mutated, and the ztunes app is a tiny demo but ofc you could easily server render it and split transitions and all sorts of things to make it more of a comparable demo to what I assume you think are downsides vs RSC.
I think time will show that RSC was a bad idea, like Redux which I also predicted would not last the time of time, it’s interesting in theory but too verbose and cumbersome in practice, and other ways of doing things have too many advantages.
The problems they solve overlap more than enough, and once you have a sync engine giving you optimistic mutations free, free local caching, and free realtime sync, you look at what RSC gives you above SSR and there’s really no way to justify the immense conceptual burden and actual concrete downsides (like now having two worlds / essentially function coloring, forces server trips / lack of routing control) I just bet it won’t win. Though given the immense investment by two huge companies it may take a while for that to become clear.
People bemoan the lack of native development, but the consuming public (and the devs trying to serve them) really just want to be able to do things consistently across phones and laptops and other computing devices and the web is the most consistent thing available, and it is the most battle-tested thing available.
The difficulty is finding designers who understand web fundamentals.
Also keep in mind the web standard puzzle is also changing all the time to try make the puzzle to fit better while developers are designing abstractions to catch up.
That how you get XMLHttpRequest -> ajax -> axio -> fetch and history.replaceState situation.
In general SPA has pushed web towards not so archiving friendly place. And PWA != SPA
The history of making HTTP requests in the browser has only been two APIs: XMLHttpRequest -> fetch. Fetch is an upgraded version of XMLHttpRequest with a promise-based API and better async/streaming support.
Ajax was a word used to describe the technique of making http requests in the browser, and axios is a third party library that wraps different APIs on different platforms to provide a unified interface. These were never separate browser APIs.
You have a point but you're giving Svelte unfair criticism here.
Well, short answer is that it's been in the "figure out what works" phase for many years now. The developer experience has improved a lot over the years, but it's at the expense of constant breaking changes and dependency hell if you want to upgrade existing code.
I still prefer svelte but it's less mature and universally-known. React is still a pretty good choice if you need something that will more or less work and that anyone can write.
I know svelte/sveltekit and would want to contribute to svelte apps (a good reminder that I should)
But there are some projects that I really really want to contribute to / heck even port to sveltekit like cinny and hedgedoc and the likes and so I almost feel pressured by the system to learn react so that I can finally feel confident enough to understand their repositories as they scare me right now...
Cinny:https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny Hedgedoc:https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc
I don’t even want to talk to somebody that defines themselves as a “React” developer. Let alone work with them.
If you know any of these frameworks, and the basics of web development you can work in any of them.
So the hiring part is not an excuse for this.
Isn't it mainly about playing nice with crawlers? SEO and the like?
(that was my understanding but I'm a backend dev).
Honestly except for the marketing page and blogs and stuff, most apps are fine without server rendering. In fact I'd say many that avoid server rendering actually feel better simply because next.js makes it really easy to screw up your performance doing it.
I see this happening in finance data sites. Say a page about Apple, has stock price, etc. when logged in, same stuff but 10x data so they layout and everything is different.
That being said, I'm waiting in the back stage, like many other folks, for tanstack to get production-ready, because of the all the weird crap being pulled by Vercel on NextJS.
Lots of newcomers are struggling and not understanding what are the options and which approach is best for their case.
Business people don’t help as they rightfully don’t care. But they want „do everything” - „pay once” approach so people bolt on static pages ona apps or other way around.
Example: This logistics SPA I was building I realized could just be single pages with some data for most of the stuff (tracking, inventory, etc...) but for admins they wanted a whole dashboard. This was a conditional on some value of the stored session user. So it ended up being kinda a website for parts of it and an SPA admin panel if the user conditionally matched some privileges. Probably should have been separate stacks but they used the same data so early on they made it the same Next app.
I don't think the whole website vs app thing is always as simple as static blog pages vs full fledged JS-heavy app. There is a spectrum and overlap even within a single "application" because of various requirements.
Your last sentence is the most accurate. I don't think its primarily ignorance, its just trying to meet all the requirements while retaining some level of organization in the codebase.
What are the reasons for not doing SSR?
My default is a small page that client then fetches any additional data it needs. If its long load time skeleton UI it. I also have not seen the SEO benefits at all.
So again _why would I_ unless I needed to do stuff on the server to make the client bundle, which I don't.
A lot of these YC companies doing this could literally just be using a fetch because their backend is dead simple REST.
EDIT: if its pure (not reactive to any other variable but other variables may react to it) they will auto memoize I guess to avoid their own reactivity engine doing a bunch of useless shit when no value was actually updated. Correct me here if I am wrong.
You have to opt-in to prop-diffing conditional re-renders (which I wouldn't call a "reactivity engine" either) per component, via React.memo.
And then you also have to opt-in to prop memoization for non-primitives for the prop-diffing not to be useless.
These re-renders might not result in any actual DOM changes since there is an additional vDOM diffing step from the resulting render (which, again, I wouldn't call a "reactivity engine").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programmin...
Which I think React doesn't really fit. React is not about data streams, nor about inferred dependencies.
> Technically you could just getElementById and update it, but react has what I call a whole "reactivity engine" to do it for you.
I would call that "declarative", not "reactive".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_programming
The closest thing to reactivity React has are dependency arrays in `useCallback` but I'd say it's a stretch to call that reactive programming.
Compare it with SolidJS's data flow. https://docs.solidjs.com/ Also notice how "reactive" is all over their landing page while React doesn't mention "reactive" at all https://react.dev/
Whereas other frameworks have a full blown reactivity system with signals (basically implicit observables), so your state values are not just regular javascript objects but either proxies or some other object which can be tracked by access in components to update things granularly, eg. setting an elements innerText but automatically.
I think it's worthwhile to compare the 2 - I'm sure one of the major contributors of React's slowness is the crazy amount of objects it generates triggering GCs - desugared jsx code turns into building up the React DOM with React.createElement
There's no reason why they couldn't have just done what Imgui did and each createElement would be a function call, that doesn't need to allocate. Considering the js API is not something most devs use, most folks wouldnt mind if it got replaced.
State management is also another issue - considering React has had a compiler due to jsx since the outset, not using that since the beginning to do a little data flow analysis and figure out which piece of state affects what UI elements is just criminal - an further exacerbates the waste in other parts of framework, by running already wasteful code more often than it needs to.
Tbf, they already fixed the compiler issue with the latest React, but only as a reaction to getting destroyed by Svelte on the performance front.
Just goes to show, that if you don't have competition, there's no guarantee positive change will happen on any time scale no matter the resources you throw at the problem.
I’ve also used Next for new projects in the last year - it just depends on the infra requirements.
Vercel’s position in the ecosystem is one we should question. Maybe it’s not good for innovation to use Next for every new project. The recent controversy with their CEO isn’t helping the situation either.
Made me just give up on web development.
I think React has an at least somewhat reasonable track record in terms of backwards compatibility? Still not perfect but much better than all the other frameworks.
That idea actually turned out to work well so others adopted it. Meanwhile in the web ecosystem elm is basically no more and react has changed enough that it's barely recognizable anymore.
And svelte was pretty new at that time, hence it would make sense that it was figuring stuff out, I think.
Though angular has gone through multiple concepts during this time between version 11 (as used in this article) and the current 20 - and especially signals and zoneless would have also massively impacted performance.
Yes, very. Perfect design upfront can eliminate the need to change it later, but you never get it perfect, so you continue to "figure it out" for many years with many failed attempts in the process.
Vue 3.4 (2023) rewrote their template rendering engine to be 2x as fast as well.
I wasn't (and still am not) the biggest fan of the new Runes syntax, but I've gotten used to it, and it doesn't really hurt my productivity or get in my way that much.
There's definitely an ecosystem gap compared to React, but there are still lots of really good components and frameworks out there. For example, there's a native Svelte version of IBM's Carbon Design[1] which I've used and found to be very high-quality.
And as for arguments that React will keep winning due to LLMs not having enough corpus to learn less-popular frameworks, I've anecdotally had good success with using LLMs to edit and generate Svelte code. There are occasionally some issues (like it generating pre-runes syntax or using deprecated stuff like stores) but it works well enough to be useful, and definitely better than I expected.
Making my LLM aware of these documents significantly mitigated issues I had with adopting Svelte 5 syntax.
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I haven't finished reading the article yet. I am a fan of Svelte, though, and have switched to using it by default for new projects - coming from a React background.
And you know what? No matter the browser, no matter the OS it all worked and rendered the same.
Probably Adobe Flash was like that also.
First app we rewrote to AngularJS. You know what happened to it. So then we rewrote it to Vue.
The same effing app just to keep the stack “modern”.
I don’t know what is wrong with all these people.
God I wish something like Silverlight returned in a way that is mobile battery friendly.
Not exactly the same, but there is Blazor, it is using html instead of xaml. Also there are third party solutions (I have no experience with) like Uno and Avalonia, both are xaml-based.
> mobile battery friendly
Do you have some specific framework in mind that is not battery friendly? Probably anything is built on js/wasm isn't battery friendly.
See “Thoughts on Flash” by Steve Jobs
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
—
As for Blazor, we ain’t fools to rewrite the RIA app the fourth time.
I just wish these “innovation” MF stopped reinventing the wheel.
The code from 2008 was perfectly fine and should have worked in 2025 if all these guys stopped making web frameworks like hot cakes. Some of us with an actual job have products that last more than a couple years (15+ in my case)
WPF was great for desktop, albeit Windows only.
So that was wrecked after .net framework became .net core (and thus needed crossplatform).
Then some shitheads at Microsoft got the “release new UI framework to get a promotion” annual bug: winui, maui, etc.
All that instead of making WPF crossplatform.
That’s why C# succumbed to server API only (and games of course, but those blokes suffer as most great C# features are not supported in Unity).
That was the grandeur of Windows Vista: not the OS but completely new dev stack (wpf, linq, wcf, etc.) that was feature rich for a few decades to come. And they fucked most of it up instead of building further on the same foundation.
And after you keep abandoning the technologies devs will say FU and go to something more stable to build a business.
Even now, .net is keep getting rewritten (meaning existing features being abandoned) because board wants those sweet-sweet money from the cloud functions and what have you instead of you being self-hosted and not vendor-locked
Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/) and Uno (https://platform.uno/) are cross platform UI frameworks for .NET.
Both work in the browser with WebAssembly. Avalonia renders to canvas. Uno can render to canvas or the DOM. Here are a couple of Avalonia demos:
The core library of React seems well managed, but the accompanying ecosystem of 3rd-party tools for styling, routing, state management, etc seem to be constantly changing.
Meanwhile in Vue land, the critical packages have remained fairly stable and are all maintained by the core team. You get support for styling and transitions out of the box; for most other things (routing, state management, etc) there is one well-maintained library (as opposed to a bunch of options of varying quality that you need to sift through).
I've been using Vue.js for 10 years at this point, and have been using the composition API for the last 5. The older options API is still viable as well.
Typescript is not a language that is good for making basic comprehensive abstractions in.
JSX is not a language that is good for making basic comprehensive abstractions in.
It's still got some baggage left over from Javascript, to be sure. But the typing is genuinely very good, and more than sufficient for "basic comprehensive abstractions".
JSX is just Javascript with syntactic sugar for HTML. It's not really intended as a general-purpose language. TSX is a fine language, but I wouldn't use it for "basic comprehensive abstractions".
Like if you want to make a basic dashboard, things like alpine/htmx should make more sense to you and you should definitely go for it
But I have found that if you are writing ever so slightly complex code, you might be then forced to write js code (not sure about blazor but even that suffers a little in benchmarks but the fact that somebody can fully stop to never touch js sounds a bit intriguing even though it maybe slow but sure)
So when you are forced to use js to write complex software, frameworks especially frameworks like svelte / maybe solid could definitely help you out
Honestly, sveltekit is just html css js and some opinionated stuff and I kinda feel like that this might be the sane thing but maybe that's because I was there when svelte 3 was launched and I was 15 so svelte was something sooo interesting to me (still is! but golang is also love, man I know that svelte and go could be integrated and maybe I would), I never really went around learning pure js dom manipulation / ts / jsx if I am being honest so I am not that much of an expert
For writing a web server library, like oak or flask or etc etc:
First, resources own the methods, methods don't own the resources, so the path comes first, easy enough, its just a string with potentially placeholders whose values need to be shunted down the line
Next is the method, for some reason a lot of libraries like to hardcode these? Immediately jumping away from comprehensive, unless you have a language that makes identifier-like things possible, e.g. symbols in ruby, or `__getattr__` in python, or proxies in javascript, of the 3, proxies are probably the most cumbersome in implementation.
then the request handling, that is fine for all languages
Templating is more of a bother: Either you use JSX, which in most cases is not XML, but instead DOM, subtle but a pain, additionally requires a compilation step before you can run the code, and also requires a DOM or DOM-lite library. Or you do chained calls with an ending call, e.g. https://sonnet.js.org/, or you do something like lit-html which is quite practical. You can't do something like title("hi") vs title({attr:123}, "hi"), as everything is an object and {} are objects, so you need to have fixed function signatures unless you want to have a lot of bother in implementing things. This is all less of a problem in other languages (e.g. Python, Ruby, Raku)
In short, Javascript does not flex when you push on it, that is great for a lot of tasks, but not so much for building frameworks where instead of having systematic ways of extending the language, either tricks are used which break other things down the line ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45472119 ), or you have opinionated narrow frameworks, which results in more churn as instead of frameworks, its more, frame-specific-use-cases.
For the part where you're describing what's possible or not in TypeScript/JS, though, you're incorrect:
You can't do something like title("hi") vs title({attr:123}, "hi")
Yes, you can. In JS it's trivial; in TypeScript, you can even do it while preserving type safety. Here's the function in TypeScript:
// First define which signatures are allowed
function title(content: string): string;
function title(attrs: Record<string, any>, content: string): string;
// Then, implement the function, handling the two possible cases:
function(contentOrAttrs: string | Record<string, any>, maybeContent?: string) {
const content = typeof contentOrAttrs === "string" ? contentOrAttrs : maybeContent!;
const attrs = typeof contentOrAttrs === "string" ? {} : contentOrAttrs;
// now use content and attrs as you please
}
I should not have used "can't" at that point, correct
To be more clear, you "can't" have a difference between an arbitrary object and a record, unless you know the type of the object and a way to disambiguate that from a record.
Of course, you "can" have a difference, a record "is" `typeof record === 'object' && Object.getPrototypeOf(record) === Object.getPrototypeOf({})` (At least as long as no one uses plain objects as non-recordy things), but, this isn't something I've ever had to care about in any other language. In some you have multiple dispatch built into the language, in some you can just pass named arguments arbitrarily. Javascript and Typescript are very inflexible in this aspect.
Like, here's the thing, sure it can create the code but LLM's stop so early in things like svelte atleast that's my opinion. I never really learnt react and didn't ever use react with any LLM
fun fact: Chatgpt 3 could write perfectly well sveltekit, that's how I "vibecoded" in the start
Like, sure I would copy paste but deep down I just felt like most of this is just plain html css js and nothing too much to worry about and that soothed me that sure this may be vibe coded but I was a real noob of svelte but the vibe coding was a bit of a successful :p
I have stopped it / atleast reminded myself 100 times to stop it because I want to feel even more confident with svelte and really learn it even more to the point that I can be 100% confident to write complex software in svelte myself and well only using AI for the boilerplate part or the tedious parts I am not sure, there is a lure to ask LLM's more and more and to depend on them more or maybe its just me I am not sure.
I live and work in London. I’ve basically not seen this culture of constant churn and rewrites that people on HN bemoan since about 2018.
Also, I'm not a huge fan of synthetic benchmarks like in the article such as "render a static list of 25000 elements". This never happens in the real world, you would use some implementation of a virtual list instead.
Blazor is slow for other reasons. You can make wasm web frameworks fast (see leptos and dioxus). It can be as fast as vanilla js. Sledgehammer on this benchmark is wasm: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2023/table...
To me Kit is the antithesis of what made Svelte so attractive to me originally. Svelte was dead simple and intuitive to use, Kit is anything but.
You see, this is something I think deeply about when creating a web framework.
I'm just glad there's another person on this plannet who thinks about file names and how they appear in code editors.
Even if I could ignore that, for my super tiny hobby project that I tried Kit with, the routing ended up being strewn across a million folders and files that are called +page nested in (page) folders, and a super tiny app turned into a nightmare to navigate and find things in. I didn't even use any of the stupid SSR stuff, just SPA mode, I can't even imagine what it ends up looking like with +layout and all the server-side files
Afterall, what is fun in webdev if not for creating factions and I am part of the lovely sveltelandia! Proud to be a member of it and I have full trust on the team.
Also the article is commenting on this other article from 2022 which is severely outdated by now.
https://journals.riverpublishers.com/index.php/JWE/article/v...
> This requires the framework to track which components are dirty. Vue does this at runtime, Svelte handles it at compile time.
How can it possibly track this at compile time? Best I could see if tracking where those bits could be set, but not actually setting them.
But Svelte 5 changed to use a signals based approach just like Vue and Solidjs, which is runtime based and more flexible. Svelte chose to add some compile time syntax sprinkles on top that they call "runes", because they like a simpler syntax. But signals are fundamentally a runtime concept.
Long answer: https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/#tools_arrows
It shares a space with React and Vue in terms of positive opinions. Opinions are worse since v5 due to the perceived increase in complexity of using the Runes system.
It is the fourth most used JS framework behind React, Vue, and Angular.
The main issue I had with Svelte was building real full-stack applications, where Sveltekit itself certainly felt behind its peers, but that's unrelated to runes/signals.
It's certainly not a rare viewpoint, just click on any link about "svelte runes" to see people upset.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/1crpj0r/svelte_5_... - https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/1htup7k/ive_been_...
You do raise a good point that LLMs make React much easier to adopt these days. Again, in my case the switch happened before I found LLMs effective for the sort of work I was doing, (but now it's a no-brainer to default to react).
(2022 paper https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/a301a02...)
Angular has OnPush change detection strategy and can even be free of zone.js now, so this isn't necessarily true.
I feel like CPUs have gotten a ton faster while bundle sizes have gotten larger and mobile networks still have a ton of latency, so network matters more in the scheme of things.
Would love to hear other perspectives, though!
But especially on mobile, rendering throughput as you put it is still relevant. Especially in response to interactions which cause significant changes to the UI. The "issue" with React is that it's all done at runtime, which does bring significant benefits but loses out on opportunities to optimise things which is what stuff like Solid, Svelte, and Vue's in-development Vapor mode take advantage of via static analysis. The benefit is performance, but you lose out on the dynamic nature of React. That is a tradeoff you need to choose when picking a framework.
Solid and Svelte are so close to vanilla JS levels of performance that you start thinking about how to optimise as if you were directly manipulating the DOM itself. Which is cool, in comparison with React you end up trying to optimise for React instead of the DOM. You still need virtualisation in a lot of cases regardless if you use React or Svelte.
I think the bigger attraction with Svelte and Solid, as well as Vue et al. is the signals / reactivity aspect. You can still tie yourself up in issues with that but it's a better mental model for a lot of developers compared to the pseudo-pure functional approach React takes. React's model can be a pain when you do need to escape-hatch to the dom itself, like you often do with complex animations, or interactions like drag-and-drop. If you can stick to pure React it can often be pretty clean.
React's compiler is designed to minimise redundant rerenders and object instantiation. It seems to help if you look at benchmarks. Still not nearly as quick as the static analysis approach because it doesn't change the underlying semantics (it's just doing stuff you would otherwise do manually for the most part).
So I would say it's still an issue, but so is latency and bundle sizes and that's also seen a lot of innovation and improvements.
(I say this speaking from a NixOS laptop; Nix operations are invariably much faster than alternatives, like Docker, assuming you have the technical chops to get them to work)
Personally I've gone back to JSX-based frameworks (there's life after react, things like solid and qwik are fantastic yet familiar) as things are generally easier to reason with when you don't have to fight the language.
TS also really seems like an afterthought on svelte and has so many weird quirks and edge cases. The implementation of generics for example, and how they solved the limitation around named exports (for the super common usecase of wanting to export the component alongside types).
It's the primary reason virtual table libraries exist.
You can get away without using frontend frameworks for small and simple projects. However, for large and complex projects you will struggle. For example, try building Google Docs without a frontend library. You will struggle even if you have an army of developers at your disposal. In fact, with a larger team, a library/framework helps standardize things.
Except that Google Docs is not built with a framework. At least not a generic one and being generic is kind of the hallmark of framework.
It is most certainly built with a framework. It is just an internal framework.
And, yes, Google has internal JS frameworks, but I am not aware that GoogleDocs is based on one.
Most software doesn't require large teams, ones with large enough structure to utilize cross-functional teams are siloed enough that it also still doesn't matter and the most standardization that's effectively useful is the company's specific UI library for their corporate branding.
At that point you're really using the company's library, and less of the underlying framework anyway. Uber, AAA, American Express, etc. All of them do basically this.
Small and simple projects like checks notes VSCode, Obsidian, Min (browser).
Also no Solid.js?
Is this AI?
Fun fact just asked chatgpt, and even chatgpt says that blazor is not js framework, so the fact that author did say makes it prove that it was just a mistake and not some AI thing but you can't always be sure of these things
It said to my question, is blazor a js framework?
Good question — no, Blazor is not a JavaScript framework.
Here’s a clear breakdown
What Blazor Actually Is
Blazor is a .NET-based web framework created by Microsoft that lets you build client-side and server-side web apps using C# and Razor, instead of JavaScript.
It runs on top of .NET runtime — not on a JavaScript engine like React, Angular, or Vue do.
Pasting the link to it here https://chatgpt.com/c/68e6d1ed-9030-8322-82fa-84267f8d20c5
Offtopic but why is my chatgpt being so sycophantic, I thought that they had reverted out the update which was causing the sycophancy but I am tired of this dumb LLM praising me, I am starting to dread the first sentence of chatgpt because of it saying good point or anything bruh.
The web is supposed to be made by tinkerers and hobbyists.
I personally like React with just React Router 7 in framework mode (Remix). So simple, so intuitive, just works, paper thing abstractions over stuff everyone already knows how to do. (Next.js OTOH I do not love)
React is where industry mind share and energy is today, regardless of developer opinions
They don’t really understand that software isn’t about “my framework can render 1000 elements 500ms faster” but rather my organization of hundreds or thousands of front end engineers (mix of employees and contractors both of whom usually don’t give a fuck) across the WORLD need to be able to work together on a significant product and ship constantly without breaking things.
And customers don’t give a fuck otherwise they wouldn’t be paying six figures or more for literally shit software.
That said I have tried it a couple times over the years. Not sure I like the latest direction they’ve gone though.
if they had stayed on their origin basis of making web apps fast with interop n ease of use the you wouldn't have the rune nonsense.
I am deeply, deeply disappointed in the field. It simultaneously has an extremely high rate of churn and an extremely low rate of actual innovation.
After observing the discipline for nearly two decades, I am concluding that almost all the "progress" really starts to look like we're just rearranging the furniture endlessly without substantive improvements in developer velocity or end user experience.
Any given "progress" looks reasonable for a moment but is ultimately circular. We've been playing rock/paper/scissors with "better" techniques for a long time now.
But given that there has not actually been progress either, my guess is that this is a temporary situation.
Either way, Svelte is one of those things that promise some real progress. Not one of the things that have the same amount of problems, but in a different configuration.
I can rarely get a 6-month-old JavaScript web project to compile and run this easily. Churn in node versions, npm/yarn versions, dependencies being abandoned, superseded, dropping backwards compatibility.
I agree that the churn is constant.
Pinned package versions in npm solves this.
If you want to use the latest dependencies then yes there is ongoing management required. There are tools to help with this.
Obligatory: sad state of web where React is so popular.
Kind of sad to see a 2022 paper about svelete with extremely questionable benchmarks get upvoted so much vs all the great things that came out of react conf yesterday.
Where frameworks lack today, in my opinion, are in providing the right tools further optimize the UX of interacting with web sites. It's a constant struggle of loading spinners and flicker and loss of scroll positions.
The only framework I see that actually tries to resolve these very hard problems is React, through their work on new asynchronous primitives like startTransition. Yes, they are currently hard to understand how to properly use, but I so wish the discourse would be around how to best resolve these actual UX issues than who can create 50M divs the fastest.
No framework will stand the test of time. I encourage everyone to, at the very least, own your state and router libraries, as you'll be able to extend them when you want to jump ship in a more incremental fashion. Going all in on a single framework's state, router, and view libraries will create a ton of inertia...
Would this make me a bad guy if I tried but couldn't find the link? oof. wait for sometime so that I see the list of my github stars because its hidden somewhere in there...
Edit: found it! https://github.com/outpoot/gurted
Here's a video as well which I found later through the github username and some yt searches later
As an addition to the general commentary here, "The Toilet Paper" is an unfortunate choice of label for this article, and maybe also indicative of the quality of the writing.
Also isn't Preact meant to be a faster option if you really need performance?
Literally every other JS framework figured this out years and years ago and some over a decade ago. Compilers help to raise the floor for everyone so we don’t need to worry about making a dumb mistake and drastically slowing down our programs. Compilers are the evolution of software.
Yes, any framework is fast enough. At this point, everybody probably knows already. Nobody would ever say React is not appropriate because it's slower than Svelte. No sane person would ever argue for a migration from React to Svelte based on this benchmark.
But being against the performance benchmark is such a weird take. It's so strange that many times there are hidden agendas.
Many times because a person advocates for X over Y at Company Z. Then, there's some random benchmark saying Y is faster. Now the person needs some way to cope. The best way is to refute the benchmark in some ways, but this would take a huge amount of time and effort. The second best way is to simply say "it doesn't matter. I hate this useless benchmark. There are more important problems to solve!"... as if everyone on the planet has to always solve the most important problem first ... only one problem and no more. Haha