You Gotta Love Frontend
15 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2019–2026
36:45 · 334K views · Apr 22, 2019
Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.
The most recommended introduction to Svelte, credited with sparking its adoption.
20 comments from Hacker News
tl;dr watch this fantastic intro to svelte talk by it's creator: this video , it covers some of the growing pains of React that svelte addresses. While it might look like the frontend is going around in circles, there are major & minor differences between the technologies, and they have each introduced novel (to JS at least) things... Off the top of my head (this timeline might not be right but it's how I went through it at least): - Backbone got you away from jquery spaghetti, helped you actually manage your data & models. Often paired with Marionette to handle views (if you squint this is the precursor to components) and bring some order in that part of the app. - Angular bundles backbone's data handling (services), marionette's orderly view separation (views, directives), but they made a fatal mistake in the apply/digest cycle and maybe encouraging a bit too much complexity. Angular is everything bundled together, with consistent usage/documentation/semantics, a familiar programming pattern (MVC), and a large corporate sponsor in Google it caught on like wildfire. - Knockout sees Angular's MVC, laments it's complexity and focuses on MVVM -- simple binding of a model and a relatively simple reactive-where-necessary controller - React comes along and suggests an even simpler world where the only first class citizen is components and everything else comes separate (this isn't necessarily new, there is an article out there comparing it to COM subsystems for windows). React is alm
> Does it solve the problem of only redrawing the required minimum (beside the normal VDOM approach)? Yes, in fact I think it's actually pretty hard _not_ to redraw the bare minimum LOL. If you want to know more about Svelte (even if you're not looking to develop with it) I HIGHLY recommend listening to this presentation called "Rethinking reactivity" by Rich Harris (the creator) this video > But does it solve the problem of growing state which never gets GC'd when components which used to use it are gone? I think the answer to the question is yes. Although the problem I'm speaking mostly about state management is the source of truth problem. Svelte provides a global store to store data, and data stored on local components are just _variables_ (no useState or hooks or anything complicated) where the Svelte compiler handles everything. Something else I'm really eyeing right now is SolidJS which takes a very similar approach to Svelte (compiler instead of library) for frontend development but provides an API that's very familiar to React developers so there's not much of a learning curve (although Svelte has a very easy learning curve too).
The talk, Rethinking Reactivity by Rich Harris[0] is an amazing talk which talks about how spreadsheets were the OG reactivity software. Highly recommended. 0: this video
It's a shame that the site's down. Until then, you can (and I heartily recommend doing so) watch the "Rethinking reactivity" video here: this video
Highly recommend this talk this video Rich Harris is an excellent speaker and it's worth seeing how Svelte approaches some things