Comment by hectorlorenzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hectorlorenzo | Hacker News Reader

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Some of these concerns were already mentioned in HN when Svelte itself got discussed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13069841), and the suggested solutions for problem #2 were (kudos to user callumlocke):

- Bundling and gzipping several Svelte components together might compress well – a lot of their size comes from repetitive substrings like `.parentNode.removeChild` and `.setAttribute` etc.

- Once downloaded, the Svelte approach would probably be faster than React (at both rendering and updating) and would use less memory (no virtual DOM, no diffing, just fast granular updates).

- The self-contained nature of Svelte components makes it easier to treat them as atomic downloads and use them as needed. For example, you could get to a working UI extremely fast, and then download more components for below-the-fold or other pages in the background. This could work well with HTTP/2.

According to js-framework-benchmark (http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/?p=431) it doesn't just use much less memory than React, it uses less memory than any other framework, because we don't have the overhead of a virtual DOM. And yes, it's significantly faster.

I answered the deduplication point in another reply to the parent, but you make a great point about code-splitting. If you're using a convention runtime framework it doesn't matter how aggressively you code-split — your smallest chunk will be at least as large as your framework. Self-contained components solve that problem.

That is fantastic, thanks for the clarification. The problem with calling self-contained components on demand is more of a mindset one: we've grown too used to compiling everything into one single file and calling it a day.

Thanks for sharing!

That's a lot of good news. Yet, I find it unsettling, that there's always going to be a minimal(after compressing/gzipping) amount of repeating code for every component.

>The self-contained nature of Svelte components makes it easier to treat them as atomic downloads and use them as needed. For example, you could get to a working UI extremely fast, and then download more components for below-the-fold or other pages in the background. This could work well with HTTP/2.

This is a huge win though - if I can load the first component extremely fast with no extra code.

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