Coding with Jesse

Svelte is the most beautiful web framework I've ever seen

June 28th, 2019

I first heard about Svelte a year ago, when Rich Harris presented it at JSConf EU 2018. The demo gods were a bit harsh on him, but it didn't matter to me, because I was so impressed by his philosophy and ideas that I was already sold. I knew he'd work out the kinks, go through a few major versions, and Svelte would be mature enough in no time.

I kind of forgot about Svelte after that, that was until last week when I read Rich Harris' blog post Why I don't use web components. It reminded how simple and beautiful Svelte's syntax is, and I decided it was time to give it some serious consideration.

First, I played a little bit with the Svelte REPL, and got a sense for how it works. Then I decided to try building a Tic Tac Toe game live on Twitch and YouTube. Even though I'm a total noob when it comes to Svelte, and I'd barely read the docs, it only took me about half an hour to get a Tic Tac Toe game working. After that, I explored some different Svelte features, trying to move the game state into a non-Svelte module, and discovered a few anti-patterns in the process.

At the end, I was completely blown away when I discovered that the production build had only 2,418 bytes of JavaScript..! That's 2.4kb including the Svelte runtime!!!

How does Svelte do it? Because Svelte is a compiler. It only includes the bare minimum of JavaScript necessary to get the job done. It turns the HTML templates you write into extremely simple DOM scripting. It transpiles the JavaScript you write so that your simple variable assignments trigger a re-render. It generates JavaScript classes to represent your .svelte files and wires everything up for you, so the only boilerplate you really need is a <script> tag and a <style> tag.

If you're interested in seeing the Tic Tac Toe game I built, you can clone it on GitHub, and spin it up with npm install, and npm start.

Otherwise, I highly recommend you check out the official Svelte Tutorial and try it out for yourself!