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Comment by broadwall | Hacker News Reader

Is there dedicated DevTools support for Solid like there is for React, Vue, Svelte, and co.? If not, is there a convenient way to inspect state, props, and the component hierarchy?

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I actually think this is extremely important. One downside of these compilation-driven frameworks is that they would, I assume, make it much more difficult to track with exactly how your code manifests at runtime, and would therefore make it harder to debug. Even setting that aside, I'm a strong believer that "frameworks" (contrasted with "libraries") have a responsibility to bring their own tooling, because existing tooling is less likely to be useful against the new concepts they introduce.

It's easier to just open up and debug than say VDOM views since you can see your dynamic expression (what's not updating) and just drop a breakpoint. The template structure flattens so you don't have this issue of nested children and what you are debugging is the actual DOM nodes. It feels more like debugging jQuery. But it is no replacement for good dev tools.

I guess what I meant is that VDOM views (at least pure-functional ones like React) can have a much clearer separation between the view logic and the state logic. I don't have to understand how the VDOM works because it's never entwined with my code that might have a bug in it: I'm just creating a data structure and handing it off. If there's a bug, it's in the creation of that data structure, which is 100% my own code. That hard barrier exists even at runtime. Solid seems like it deeply entwines the two in a way that's very clever and has performance advantages, but would also, I expect, come with a cost.

Yes it's all the same thing. Your data is reactive and an be modularized. The renderer is reactive with the DOM basically being a side effect. There basically is no renderer just a reactive system with different types of data. It means there is an incredible amount of flexibility and raw performance.

The tradeoff is rendering isn't particularly special. So the systems consciousness of specific render specific concepts requires additional consideration. There is no "onMount". There are reactive lifecycles but they aren't particularly tied to DOM updates.

There is an open issue for this. It's an area that needs work since I can't just repurpose existing tools like VDOM libraries do. The challenge that comes with pioneering an approach.

This seems like a silly issue. At one time there was no DevTool support for any of those other tools you mentioned.

This is not a silly issue.

Lack of devtools is expected for a new framework, however, it is worth asking for, especially if you are considering it for production

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