Hacker News Reader

Comment by erokar | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way. We've switched from React to Svelte at work. Going back to React would be a step backwards for us, so much feels needlessly overengineered with awkward APIs. React was a great improvement on Angular, but luckily things are still moving forward.

View on HN

Well, this sounds a bit typical JS dev talk. React isn't all that terrible, it's actually quite good and battle-proven. It has great libraries, many devs are familiar with it and if you know it well you can be pretty damn productive with it.

Not to say Svelte doesn't have great innovative features, but I myself don't still feel that tempted to jump into Svelte. What some of us don't like, is the infamous JS churn where libraries are changed every year because "this new one is better".

Some of us are attracted to JS dev because of the rapid evolution and change. React is well-tested and mature, I'm simply stating that for me personally going back to it would be frustrating after developing in Svelte.

React is extremely bloated. I don’t think it can justify its weight on content pages. If all you need are some show hide buttons and a CSS animation, it’s way too heavy. That’s a pretty good reason to look at other tools.

If all you need are some show hide buttons and a CSS animation, do the whole thing in four or five lines of vanilla JS in an inline script tag. You're right that React is the wrong tool for the job, but so is Svelte and so is everything else discussed in this thread.

Which UI component library, if any, do you use with Svelte ?

Sveltestrap[0] but needs Bootstrap for the CSS styling (I personally like the separation but YMMV)

[0] https://sveltestrap.js.org/

UI component libraries for Svelte are a little lacking in maturity in my experience. I would recommend including a CSS library such as Bootstrap or Materialize. Tailwind is also popular, but not my cup of tea.

So, React is backwards, but you are using Bootstrap instead? Lol. Webdevs at their best.

There are good alternatives to React that are as actively developed. There don't seem to be good alternatives to Bootstrap that are nearly as actively developed (excluding CSS utility class libraries like Tailwind).

My team recently evaluated 30-40 CSS frameworks to use with a custom component library, and we were surprised when Bootstrap was the clear winner. Other CSS frameworks have gotten buzz over the years, and we assumed something new and shiny would come out on top, but when we evaluated all of them, we saw sporadic commits, many unresolved issues (e.g., see Bulma issue 3074), small bus factors, inadequate support for keyboard navigation, and other issues.

So using Bootstrap with a newer alternative to React is valid. (Though, we're using Bootstrap with Next.js.)

By all means, stick to your React or Java backend or whatever it is you do if that's where you feel most comfortable. No need to feel so threatened by new alternatives.

I've had great success with http://ibm.biz/carbon-svelte for one of my side projects.

Looks great. Thanks.

Technically any static ui library can easily be turned into reactive components in any of the frameworks. I personally use & recommend Tailwind css, you still need to design/build your UI elements and components but Tailwind helps you speed it up.

How are y'all testing your svelte apps/components? Jest+Testing Lib seems to have issues calculating code coverage and there are few quirks like having to do work arounds to test slots that prevent me from totally switching over.

Our test coverage of the Svelte apps is meagre so far to be honest.

Their response to "How do I test Svelte apps?"

"We don't have a good answer for that yet, but it is a priority."

I was interested in Svelte until I read this. When they have a good answer, I'll be interested again.

https://svelte.dev/faq#how-do-i-test-svelte-apps

The solution to this, I believe, is making template a function: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25023551

Reply on news.ycombinator.com