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Comment by gg2222 | Hacker News Reader

To the author: Yes, do consider SolidJS seriously. I find that its reactivity system is simple and the easiest to reason about, with none of the messiness and constant changes to "the best practice way to do things" like React has gone through the years.

SolidJS seems designed right so that it doesn't need so many major revisions and it feels quite stable.

It feels like an evolved React that is simpler to use.

Also its signals and stores can be used in normal .ts files, so it is easier to create re-usable "stores".

edit: BTW haven't been following Svelte but it's already version 5? I thought it was the newest framework.

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Looked at SolidJS, it's primary mechanism is signals, which are essentially runtime edit maps. They have the same downside as all other types of edit maps - programmer needs to compose them manually, which becomes messy very quickly with loops and conditions.

What are edit maps?

Mapping between reactive variable and DOM element. I first heard this term in Million.js docs, but it explains very well what most 'reactive' frameworks are doing. For example, a Signal creates the mapping at runtime on first render.

>> SolidJS seems designed right so that it doesn't need so many major revisions

Which is exactly what is said about every framework

It's different with solid-js, which is more of a library than a real framework.

The solid-js surface is relatively small, the jsx / css is identical to the native, the Hook simply builds the DOM once. solid-js therefore brings above all a createSignal that adds an observer where it is called in the DOM to directly update the DOM accordingly.

You might think of solid-js more as a signal primitive than a real framework.

Exactly. SolidJS api itself is very small, there is not much you actually have to learn. This makes it simple to reason about and at the same time gives you the confidence to wield it, which makes it actually feel more powerful.

Its funny because "its different with [insert framework]" is also said about every new framework ever.

May I remind you that React was originally a library. Didn't stop it from morphing into...whatever it is now

> SolidJS seems designed right so that it doesn't need so many major revisions and it feels quite stable.

lol https://github.com/solidjs/solid/discussions/2425

Yes I know SolidJS 2.0 is coming. I said "it doesn't need so many major revisions", key word being "so many".

(Telling myself: damn should of put that in my original comment cause of course someone's gonna comment that.)

These frameworks have so many versions over time because the web, browsers, and people’s expectations of the capabilities of websites are a moving target.

Over time you’ll see many major revisions as you do in every other framework in existence.

It’s major version 2. Compare that to the amount of major (and really breaking, like Vue) for all other frameworks.

LOL

Solid is much more recent, of course it has less major versions.

Solid is so underrated.

The simplicity and the power it brings is so good.

I’ve also used SolidStart for a project and it’s by far the best meta framework I’ve tried so far. Again, simplicity, power and extensibility.

SolidJS is extremely well crafted signaling, I like it.

However, the SolidJS ecosystem falls behind when building a full web application: The router is okay? Metadata is very separate... and SolidStart isn't pulling it all together in the way it should. Working with async is also a mess.

This makes it feel like you're having to learn 3-4 entirely separate systems.

Yes, what I want might be some better React, like JSX, but I don't like the complexity introduced by hooks and the binding of Next.js.

The best time to learn React and use it was while it was small and literally just a library.

Svelte dates back to 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svelte#History

Yes, so actually SolidJS is newer.

That’s technically true but Svelte had a major paradigm shift in v4 and an extension of that paradigm in v5. The name is older, but the underlying code is newer.

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