rich_harris

Hey everyone, Rich from the Svelte team here. Coordinating all the moving parts for yesterday's launch (last few PRs, doc updates and redirects, CLI release, launch blog post...) turned out to be a bit of a slog so I'll confess I turned off my laptop and went for a beer as soon as it was done instead of sticking around to engage in HN threads and Reddit and so on.

Honestly, I didn't expect the release to generate much conversation at all. There's a lot less focus/interest in front-end frameworks generally these days, for obvious reasons, so I figured the median reaction would be 'oh, the Svelte team are still shipping? good for them' and not much more. It's a joy to see the conversation here whether it's from happy users, or people who prefer different things, or people who have fully outsourced the writing-the-code bit to LLMs and straight up don't care about the underlying tools any more.

Which I totally understand! As framework authors we're very persnickety about the details of the code, so we've been on the slower end of the LLM adoption curve, but even we're starting to delegate more of the work to agents. If you're prompting an app into existence it's natural not to care that much about the particulars. But a question I've seen several times here, and in the zeitgeist more generally — 'in a world of agents why should I care about Svelte vs React vs whatever?' — deserves an answer.

And it's this: your app will be _better_ if you use Svelte. Your JavaScript bundle will use fewer bytes, your server-side rendering will take fewer milliseconds, and your users will reap the benefits: faster, more efficient apps. For all that the agentic revolution has created a huge _quantity_ of software, the _quality_ of the average app stubbornly refuses to budge. If anything, software is becoming less reliable. I think we've all felt that. Using a framework that treats things like accessibility and progressive enhancement as core concerns will help you steer towards better outcomes. (Your agent will use fewer tokens as well.)

Of course, this was always the pitch! Agents don't change that. And that's why we're still shipping and still sweating the details. We have some stuff coming up that we're unreasonably excited about — we really care about this stuff, and we're very grateful to be part of a community who shares that passion. Thank you for the support, it means the world to us.

What a ridiculous comment. This is the first major release of SvelteKit in three years; the last major release of Svelte was two years ago.

The docs don't appear to cover progressive enhancement. Is this an oversight?

The Svelte implementation is very inefficient. With a small change I was able to get it to the number two spot on both duration and memory, at least running on this machine. Thyn is in the top spot on both counts — not _hugely_ surprising for a brand new project, but impressive nonetheless.

React, needless to say, languishes at the bottom.

Will send a PR to fix the Svelte implementation.

No, if you're using `adapter-static` (or, if not using SvelteKit at all, just not doing any dynamic server-rendering) then you are not affected. But upgrade anyway!

If you think 'helping developers meet their legal obligations to build sites that can be used by everyone' is 'woke', then you should go and use a different framework.

Three of us are employed by Vercel, and we're probably responsible for over 50% of commits. The core team is much larger than just us though

ISR _can't_ be implemented at a framework level without tying the framework to the platform. The fact that we instead chose to implement it via a platform-agnostic adapter API surely demonstrates the opposite of what you're implying

> I have no doubts they'll do the same with Nuxt, demanding they implement features that solely exist to pad out hosting costs while providing next to no actual benefits to end users and devs

has that happened with Svelte?

> they now have a monopoly over the most popular frontend meta frameworks (Next, Svelte/Kit, Nuxt, Astro)

this would be a surprise to the Astro team!

For sure — just wanted to be totally explicit that SvelteKit will always be platform agnostic

This simply isn't going to happen.