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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question:

Why would you use Solid instead of Svelte?

I'm coming from React and most alternatives seem quite similar to me. Only Svelte does things very differently with its compiler. Vue and Solid just seem to be a different flavour of React.

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Ironically, mechanically Vue and Svelte historically were much closer to React. Vue has a similar VDOM and Svelte while compiled still had a rerun component model. It was only the past year about 6 years after Solid showed the way Svelte 5, and Vue Vapor got away from that and now compile down to what more or less Solid has been doing all along. Of course this is under the surface. But in many ways while Solid itself has stayed relatively small it has profoundly impacted the rest of the ecosystem in a way we haven't seen since React. From Vue, Svelte, to Angular, Preact, and Qwik all using Signals now. The average user of these frameworks probably has no idea but everyday all the non-React frameworks work more and more like Solid.

I love Svelte, but you are absolutely right about Solid's influence. Svelte's Signals implementation seems very performant compared to other Signals-based frameworks. [0]

[0] https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/discussions/13277

SolijS is just JS without much magic. It's simple, small and very fast.

You can use signals and effects outside of components and it just works. You can even use a signal from the global scope within a component. Tracking of signals for effects and derived values is automatic. It looks very similar to React, but it's better in every way. Honestly the first time I'm happy with this kind of library. Don't need much more.

Edit: As for Svelte: like it too, but at least before Svelte 5 there were some footguns and differences between components and "normal" JS code. I haven't tried Svelte 5 yet, only watched some videos. From the looks of it would consider it as a good alternative.

Yes, Solid is very fast, but Svelte's Signals implementation seems to be even more performant. [0]

I just loved the simplicity of using $: for deriveds and effects in Svelte 3 and 4. But after building a correlation matrix [1] and a work project with Svelte 5, I have to say that I really like it.

[0] https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/discussions/13277

[1] https://covary.xyz

Thanks for the info. I’ll definitely check Svelte 5 out.

To be fair by that metric Vue has the fastest now with its core built with Alien Signals. Raw reactivity benchmarks don't actually show very much because these systems are so fast that the quickest to the slowest reactive library doesn't even make a dent on a test that says render the DOM. And I say this as a benchmark enthusiast (and as that benchmark actually was crated by Milo from the SolidJS core team as part of our 2.0 research)

That's good to know, thanks! Alien Signals is such a great name.

I've tried both and I much prefer Solid. The key advantage for me is that it's just JS/JSX -- you can use it in both your UI code and JS utility functions and it works everywhere. Svelte seems a lot more magical; your UI code is in a special language that looks different and works differently from JS utility functions.

Edit to add: if you dislike JSX I'd guess you would probably prefer Svelte over Solid.

so i managed to convince my company to try solid on a new project, pretty much on the basis of "this looks like react but solves many of our existing problems with react". since the JSX and project structure is basically the same, we could take our (pretty tiny at the time) demo project and do a 1:1 diff and show the differences inline. and it was pretty compelling! the code was simpler, and faster, and we still got to keep lots of the unique patterns/other stuff we were used to when creating react apps

I would not necessarily. It depends.

They are pretty close in mindset (how state works), but Svelte is more established, better polished, has better docs, with a larger community, and of course, great animation / transition support. Svelte 5 does not have dev tools at the time of this writing, just like Solid. SFC is great, Solid has no comparable offering. It also has robust error handling, better than Solid.

That said, Solid has a way better Tanstack Query implementation. (No idea why we still don't have a proper Svelte 5 version today.) It is reasonably close to React that you may feel it should be easy to switch – though that is deceptive. Most of the work is not in the templates but in how the state works, and for this reason it is easier to port Solid code to Svelte or Vue than to React. Developing in Solid is smoother, because it is not a custom template, but just TypeScript. Less concepts to learn, if you are well versed in React.

Both can be good choices for different use cases. And then sometimes React is the right choice.

I haven't used Solid yet, but it is commonly said to have "fine-grained" reactivity, compared to React, and better performance.

I also think that Svelte, having a compiler, seems like that it would have an edge in theory.

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