Svelte 5 Released

I went with Svelte when I built out the website for my canvas library a few years back[1]. It's proved to be easy to maintain the site, and I particularly like that it supported my vanilla JS library (which I use on the site's landing page) with minimal fuss.

At some point I want to update the site to use Sveltekit, which I'd been experimenting with in personal projects. But then the team announced Svelte 5 and these things called "runes" and ... I don't know. Having just passed my 60th birthday I'm getting to a stage in my life when keeping up with all the New Shiny makes me wonder if it's worth the effort, or if I should be doing more interesting stuff like creating new content for the site instead.

[1] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/

It's funny because very early on the key selling point of Svelte was that you just mutate objects and it compiles to the observable pattern, unlike React's clunky setState syntax. Now, somehow magic symbols in the code is supposed to be an improvement? It doesn't seem that different from React's magic hooks these days.

Is there some mysterious force of nature that binds front-end frameworks to bad decision making?

I haven’t had the chance to use Svelte in even a semi-serious project. From what I’ve tracked, Runes allow for better handling state complexity and allowing finer grained explicit control of reactivity.

Maybe you don’t need that. Seems like a bunch of the Svelte community did. I wouldn’t frame that as a bad decision.

There is probably a reason they did with a ground-up rebuild and partially this is because svelte 4 didn't enable universal reactivity and $ was more confusing than useful.

Furthermore <slot /> had limitations in terms of children which made it difficult to build UI libraries.

Svelte 5 now is actually simpler to learn for new comers despite higher verbosity.

I love it!