Such a great project. I converted my React-enjoying cofounders to Svelte/SvelteKit worried they wouldn't like it, but they absolutely love it!
We use Svelte extensively at Orb.net for our website (duh), but also as a framework for our desktop and mobile apps. Wails serves our golang and SvelteKit/Svelte provide the UX. It's been tremendous for multiplatform productivity, and binaries are less than 20mb! Nothing like Electron!
+1 for Wails mention: just discovered it recently which brought me to Svelte--couldn't be more impressed. Golang "backend" w/ a Svelte "frontend" to build desktop apps the fraction of the size of Electron is a killer imo.
The thing I like about Svelte the most is that it's closer to raw HTML. Rather than having to keep up with all the React developments if you're not using it all the time.
I don't think that's true anymore. I've seen a few benchmarks where svelte results in less tokens than React frameworks to complete the task. There was a time when LLMs were awful at svelte (especially v5) due to stale knowledge but that's not the case today. The knowledge cutoff isn't so bad and LLMs are much better at copying the patterns in your own codebase rather than relying on baked in knowledge.
There is an argument to choose the ecosystem with the best code quality so the training data pushes the general balance to better systems. There is a lot of bad react code not to mention lots of change in react itself over time.
In my experience LLMs write mediocre React code: it works, but is the most naive implementation possible for a given task. It needs to be bullied extensively to write performant React that considers prop stability, does updates in event handlers instead of convoluted useEffect chains, etc. I haven't tried Svelte in a while but "lots of React in training data" doesn't feel like a huge boon to me.
This seems like flame bait, but I'll take the question seriously: I would rather write a Svelte application by hand than manage a React one via LLM. It's just a more intuitive framework, fewer pitfalls, cleaner reactivity, and is much more performant out of the box.
every time I see this argument I think of the fact that one of my current side projects is written in D with qt bindings off github - an obscure library for an obscure language - and claude had zero issues with it. I had to guide the architecture pretty heavily, but the fiddly bits of interfacing multithreaded c libraries to D's garbage collector and qt's event loop were all thanks to the LLM, and done a lot quicker than I would have.
I can’t really speak directly to your question because I don’t have LLMs write react, but I get great results from svelte.
At this point I don’t think it’s about training examples, once there is sufficient training data it becomes a problem of verifiability, ie how easily can the model check its work for success.
i have had similar thoughts. But i hold on to the idea that its still valuable to invent new tools and ways of doing things. other wise, why not just use html css and javascript and not use react at all?
A couple years ago I wanted to make a ui for an embedded software I made, after few research I got bamboozled with webdev eco system, it was the most frustrating thing to read, then found svelte in its first version and never looked anywhere else, the closest to vanilla, simple, and fast.
Been using SvelteKit 3 on a couple of personal projects since the beta and haven't had any issues. The best part is that it barely introduces new features and instead improves on existing features.
They're effectively ready to use even if experimental; the migration path is typically pretty painless when features are stabilised and the codemods get you most of the way. There's a couple of missing features for them but if you don't need those then it's not a problem.
The idiomatic way to do data fetching in stable SvelteKit is via load functions.[0]
They still do a good job and allow you to cache the results and invalidate that cache, but they are at a route/layout level rather than at a component level, which is what remote functions solve.
We use Svelte extensively at Orb.net for our website (duh), but also as a framework for our desktop and mobile apps. Wails serves our golang and SvelteKit/Svelte provide the UX. It's been tremendous for multiplatform productivity, and binaries are less than 20mb! Nothing like Electron!
I've had to work on a Next.js for work and much prefer Sveltekit. Excited to try this release!
Edit: This is the benchmark. But if you suspect it's wrong it's always fun to run your own evals. https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-web-frameworks-are-mo...
At this point I don’t think it’s about training examples, once there is sufficient training data it becomes a problem of verifiability, ie how easily can the model check its work for success.
They still do a good job and allow you to cache the results and invalidate that cache, but they are at a route/layout level rather than at a component level, which is what remote functions solve.
[0] https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/load