Svelte 5

Congrats on the release and the new website. I've been using Svelte 5 for the last couple of weeks and I'm in love.

Awesome work & congratulations Rich and team. I'm a longtime Svelte user and advocate for Svelte over React and Vue. I'm glad to Svelte 5 growing in strength and finesse. In particular, the new runes and new snippets are both much appreciated.

IMHO you're on HN and reading this, and know about React or Vue, then give Svelte 5 a look. It's easy to pick up because Svelte uses all the HTML, CSS, and JS/TS that you already know. And Svelte 5 works with SvelteKit, which is a great framework for apps, including routers, caches, SSR, etc.

What's the difference between runes and signals?

Svelte 5 runes are Svelte-specific syntax for the generic idea of JS signals such as found in SolidJS. Svelte runes are effectively compiler keywords.

Broadly speaking, runes are aiming to be higher level (e.g. pretty syntax to help developers declare state) whereas signals are lower level (e.g. how internal implement state dependencies).

Svelte runes, as a concept, are somewhat contentious among some developers. This is because runes make Svelte feel more like React or Vue, yet feel less simple. My opinion is that runes are a good/necessary step for building larger apps, even though it makes it a bit harder for novices.

Related discussion: Svelte 5 Released | 394 points by begoon 2 days ago | 235 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41889674

[dupe]

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41889674

I’ve not used Svelte since it first came out, but what annoys me a bit is that all these frameworks whose USP is that they are simple, then time goes by and they all seem to add more complex stuff that I’m not sure it’s needed?

Vue was the same, vue 1 was simple and you could get going within minutes, svelte had the same feeling first time I used it, but now looking at version 5, it still looks simple, but seems to start leaning towards the same route vue took..

Runes are part of the Svelte language and compiler.

Signals are an implementation detail.

I used Vue 2 for a number of years and see what you mean about Vue 3.

I don't think this is what happened with Svelte though. I never used v1 but v5 simplified and distilled a lot of things vs v3 (and v4 which was almost identical).

Having a play now with the tutorial [1] – works great!

[1] https://svelte.dev/tutorial/svelte/welcome-to-svelte

These new serif fonts make the website absolutely unreadable and it franky looks very ugly. Not sure if this should be seen as a metaphor on how complicated Svelte became ;)

I'm not very qualified to speak on the subject, but Svelte had (last I checked) the feature of not having a VDOM, meaning I was able to use generic JS libraries with it that did not require a implementation that was Svelte-only, as is the case with many such React and Vue libraries.

Personally, I like to stay as close to web standards as possible, instead of tying myself to specific implementations of specific addons for specific frameworks.

The charitable explanation is that a lot of it is needed; that there is an inherent complexity to this domain, and the relative simplicity they tout at launch is possible because they haven’t yet contended with real-world use.

I don't understand these points when lower in the discussion another user mentions: > Svelte-specific syntax

React is the closest to standard JS in my experience.