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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
Sveltekit has been a breath of fresh air for me over the last few years.
I've had to work on a Next.js for work and much prefer Sveltekit. Excited to try this release!
what's the point of svelte in a world where the llm is much better at react due to massively more available training data?
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.
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...
IMO a lot of React apps are written badly, with an explosion of dependencies. I don’t want to be responsible for a project trained on that.
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.
Tells you something about the average React code
LLMs are great at Svelte
I don't think LLMs are much better at react. I've migrated two apps from next to sveltekit and it was a breeze using codex.
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.
In my experience LLMs write better svelte code then React code, as there's fewer footguns (e.g. useEffect is much more brittle in React)
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?
svelte is way more performant than react.
LLMs don't struggle with Svelte. Why wouldn't you use it?
What's the point of anything?
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.
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.
Can somebody with experience using both compare Svelte/Sveltekit with Vue/Nuxt?
Still waiting for remote functions to become ready :/
I've been using them in production for several months and zero issues. A few small workarounds here and there but otherwise they've been great.
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.
What was used instead before ?
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.
[0] https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/load
I've had no problem using them in 2.x