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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting because it's a bit like Svelte, but it doesn't use the Svelte "language" (which looks like JS and HTML but, in some crucial ways, sometimes isn't).

It's a little disheartening to see that it's 3+ years old and has only had a single significant contributor though[1].

It's impossible to avoid single-contributor projects in the JS world, especially with Node, but the alternatives (React, Vue, Angular, and even Svelte) are orders of magnitude more popular, so it's one area that we can play it safe if we need to.

1. https://github.com/solidjs/solid/graphs/contributors

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I'd also look at other repos. Admittedly for the core code it has been mostly me. I think there is an intimidation factor. When you create a library this performance oriented it is hard to get people comfortable working on the core.

But things like the site, docs etc.. are much more contributors making more substantial submissions: https://github.com/solidjs/solid-site/graphs/contributors https://github.com/solidjs/solid-docs/graphs/contributors

We would have never gotten the docs translated into 15 languages otherwise. I do agree that one should be cautious regardless. But I don't want to underplay the contributions of many contributors putting in improvements every day.

There are projects of mine where I'm the only relevant core contributor but the ecosystem is developed by many other people and it's largely worked out fine.

I would hope that if either of us got hit by the proverbial bus that people involved in the ecosystem would pour themselves a strong drink and dig in to the necessary maintenance anyway.

Projects I've ended up moving on from have regularly worked out that way, and I think that while solid might not be as popular as some people would want for something to bet their production code on, it does seem to me that it's popular -enough- that I don't believe you're a truly dangerous single point of failure here.

(if this comment read as negative rather than an attempt at a clear eyed analysis, I apologise for phrasing it wrong)

I have no idea if it's in the creator's interest but I'd love to see Solid get backed by a company the way React, Angular, and Svelte are. That might make people take it more seriously as an option but, as-is, it certainly feels like a risky option to use professionally.

FWIW, the author joined the Marko core team at eBay a while back.

But from what I hear, he's still pretty responsive on Github.

Solid is sponsored by Vercel, Cloudflare and Netify

solid.js may only have a single contributor but i believe it’s been battle-tested and used in some larger projects (don’t have any examples off the top of my head though)

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