As a full-time Svelte user for three years, I've built a real-time collaborative website builder with 10 000+ users. My solo success wouldn't have been possible without Svelte, and here's my take on the latest sneak peek of Svelte 5. First and foremost, a big shoutout to the Svelte team and Rich Harris for their relentless dedication. I've been in love with Svelte for over three years, watching its evolution from the sidelines and loving every update. I consider myself one of its biggest fans. I do not wish to bring any negativitiy, I’m simply showing my perspective as a long term user.
Sep 26, 2023·edited Sep 26, 2023Liked by Filip Tangen
I'd take a preprocessor that only does "Make all top-level variables in the script tag into $state()". I'm down with the rest of the changes, but this is the thing still bugging me.
Most these points reflect my exact thoughts. Svelte was my last refuge for reactive frameworks. I was really shocked that this introduced without even an open RFC or more initial feedback from Svelte users. My initial reaction was: But who was asking for something like this? Are the core devs and Rich this out of touch with Svelte users. Most of us left React or Vue Composition API because Svelte reactivity was a breath of fresh air. I understand Runes makes it easier for the compiler to invalidate and increases performance but Svelte performance was already great or at least good enough for all my use-cases. I didn't have reactive edge-case bugs beyond the first week of using svelte, once I understood and established usage patterns.
Furthermore, I now have to go explain to my higher-ups that the big app we're re-writing in Svelte will have a paradigm shift much like React Classes to Hooks or Vue Options API to Composition API and they are going to immediately question if Svelte is really enterprise ready yet again.
Having skipped react because of it's verbosity i started in Vue (1) and adopted the Composition/Setup-Combination eagerly because it simplified everything eben further (you might disagree a bit here).
Then i discovered Svelte and this reduced the boilerplate stuff even more.
Svelte 5 now takes away the reason i switched to Svelte in the first place.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Filip. I understand that you do not like the more verbose way to define reactive state. I agree with that, though I personally like the explicit API of runes a lot! I'm willing to write a _bit_ more verbose code for a reactive model that is more straightforward and consistent, with less caveats. In the end it is not the number of characters that count most, but the complexity of the mental model needed to interpret it.
Are there parts of Svelte 5 and runes that you _do_ like?
I have totally the same opinion. Thanks for the article.
I'd take a preprocessor that only does "Make all top-level variables in the script tag into $state()". I'm down with the rest of the changes, but this is the thing still bugging me.
Most these points reflect my exact thoughts. Svelte was my last refuge for reactive frameworks. I was really shocked that this introduced without even an open RFC or more initial feedback from Svelte users. My initial reaction was: But who was asking for something like this? Are the core devs and Rich this out of touch with Svelte users. Most of us left React or Vue Composition API because Svelte reactivity was a breath of fresh air. I understand Runes makes it easier for the compiler to invalidate and increases performance but Svelte performance was already great or at least good enough for all my use-cases. I didn't have reactive edge-case bugs beyond the first week of using svelte, once I understood and established usage patterns.
Furthermore, I now have to go explain to my higher-ups that the big app we're re-writing in Svelte will have a paradigm shift much like React Classes to Hooks or Vue Options API to Composition API and they are going to immediately question if Svelte is really enterprise ready yet again.
Couldn't agree more.
Having skipped react because of it's verbosity i started in Vue (1) and adopted the Composition/Setup-Combination eagerly because it simplified everything eben further (you might disagree a bit here).
Then i discovered Svelte and this reduced the boilerplate stuff even more.
Svelte 5 now takes away the reason i switched to Svelte in the first place.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Filip. I understand that you do not like the more verbose way to define reactive state. I agree with that, though I personally like the explicit API of runes a lot! I'm willing to write a _bit_ more verbose code for a reactive model that is more straightforward and consistent, with less caveats. In the end it is not the number of characters that count most, but the complexity of the mental model needed to interpret it.
Are there parts of Svelte 5 and runes that you _do_ like?