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by k__ 2288 days ago
I'm a React fanboy, but I have to admit, the Svelte performance and code size is impressive.

Maybe that would be a feasible way to get a modern developer experience without the bloat?

2 comments

Svelte is my favourite framework right now (it's really reignited my love for web development after using React for a long time), but unfortunately one of their criteria/use cases was "build step as well as no build-step", which doesn't work since Svelte is a compiler.

While I thought dropping the "no build-step" requirement wouldn't be a big deal nowadays, they later say:

> We should still explore introducing a full build step in the future (including full support for module bundling, ES6+ transpilation via Babel, etc), but this is a non-trivial change to the architecture of MediaWiki.

I can see why going with something that doesn't need a build-step could be appealing.

There's also the other factor (mentioned below) about community. If MediaWiki chose Svelte, they would definitely have to invest a lot into the framework and it's community, and I'm not sure if that's something they want to or are capable of doing. The biggest pain point with Svelte right now (at least for me) is the tooling, it's real bad.

This is the only mention about Svelte:

> Svelte, Inferno, and Preact are aggressively optimized for performance but have much smaller communities of users (Preact suffers from this issue to a lesser extent, but only as long as it maintains a very high level of compatibility with mainstream React, which may not be the case forever).

I'd be interested in seeing a bit more discussion about it.

One of their criteria is widespread adoption. Svelte isn't there yet. One day it probably will be, but today is not that day.
I think that's a chicken egg thing. If Wikimedia adopted it, adoption rates would skyrocket.
Really, what makes you believe so?

IMO, to drive adoption rates, you would need dev evangelists

While the RFC states that they are taking cautious route here.

They also mention that they are not making an SPA which all the cool kids look up to.

The best type of evangelism is adoption by one of the most heavily used sites in the world.
nope, the best type of evangelism is evangelism. adoption by most heavily used sites jsut proves technical feasibility.

Unless the devs of "most heavily used sites" evangelize, it makes no matter which sites use svelte. As a matter of fact, Vue's adoption increased after Taylor Otlwell (Laravel's creator) and other started _telling_ people that they are planning to use Vue, instead of react.

Wide range adoption followed next.