Lit: a library for building fast, lightweight web components

I used lit for a few small components on my blog, https://pdx.su, and have mostly ignored them since writing them two years ago. When I recently had to update them with a new feature, I was extremely pleased that the usual js experience of finding out that I was a million versions behind wasn't there.

I'm confused, there's been a new major version every two years for the past decade. (Polymer 1 in 2015, Polymer 2 in 2017, Lit 1 in 2019, Lit 2 in 2021, Lit 3 in 2023.)

Lit 2 to Lit 3 was really minimal: https://lit.dev/docs/releases/upgrade/

As I recall inside Google it was maybe one in a thousand elements that needed any changes at all. I updated the entire internal codebase of many tens of thousands of elements in a couple weeks of part time work.

But more importantly Lit 2 and Lit 3 are interoperable, so there's not the same pressure to update. When an element or library updates from Lit 2 to Lit 3, it can do that as a point release, because its public API is the same. This really reduces the amount of upgrade toil you have to deal with.

It's 2025