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Comment by ranting-moth | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm just the grumpy old guy that's afraid of change.

But I fell in love with Svelte because it was dead simple (according to me). It was a breeze of fresh air and I felt I just program again without wiring enchantments together.

I do agree that its simplicity has downsides too, so perhaps it's just nothing to be afraid of?

But I can't help seeing this as ominous:

> This is just the beginning though. We have a long list of ideas for subsequent releases that will make Svelte simpler and more capable.

Please don't turn Svelte into a black magic box.

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Largely agree.

I've got a couple of thousand hours of Svelte dev experience, and these changes offer me nothing I really want.

Svelte dependencies outside my .svelte files? No thanks, I'll keep them usable in non-Svelte projects.

A new way to do reactivity to try to appeal to React users? ("When people come to our community in future..." in the vid.) No, thanks! Svelte 3/4 reactivity was very straightforward, one could learn the whole thing in a day from the excellent tutorials. It was better than React.

There was definitely a bit of weirdness with overuse of reactive vars but that's been incentive to keep components small and simple. A good thing!

Personally I'm still stuck on v3 because 4 introduced breaking changes I haven't had a chance to debug, so it'll be a while until any of this impacts me anyway.

I’m definitely getting some react vibes from this. And I hate react.

Maybe I just need to try it out.

Agree. Svelte is a blast to write as an old grumpy backend engineer. But yes, probably just scared for nothing. Turning onMount() into $effect() is a tiny change, but this self-aware smol brained grug likes onMount() as it means something! To enable logical grouping, Svelte 5 allows us to nest the $effect()s? What does that even mean? Where am I? Nurse!

nesting means that a variable being watched in the parent scope triggers both the parent and child functions, but a change to a variable in the child's scope only triggers the child function.

maybe super specific to this comment but onMount isn't going away, it could be replaced with $effect from an implementation standpoint, but it would be wildly confusing if used for that purpose without the clearer name for the wrapper

This set of changes makes things more explicit. That's the opposite of a black magic box as far as I can see

Definitely. It's surprising to see all these magic comments.

Maybe it's because of using the "runes" word :)

Was my first gut reaction as well. Especially when i saw `$state(0)`.

But watch the introduction video. It isn't at all like the functional reactivity that entered other frameworks. It's still the svelte way. Read and assign is plain javascript. Only the initialization syntax changed.

They even promise backwards compatibility, so you don't have to migrate or migrate file by file if you want to. Which is also not how other frameworks handled this in the past.

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