[pavish]

I agree with most of what the author says, except the part about reactivity. I attribute that sentiment to the author being less familiar with Svelte.

I do think that people new to Svelte find it hard. It takes a while to understand how the `$` reactive statements work, and when and when-not to use it. When I first started working with Svelte, I tried to do things the React way and shared similar frustrations. Now that I've been working with Svelte for smaller and bigger projects for nearly 5 years (yes, since 2.0), I find Svelte's reactive pattern simple and intuitive.

There are some aspects I find frustrating with Svelte. One example is being able to pass templates around. With React I'd just pass JSX, but since Svelte is statically compiled, I've had to create components for such scenarios. Slots don't cover all usecases. I can live with this though.

I have built a couple large projects using Svelte and haven't faced issues with scaling. I found Svelte to be quite flexible, which has enabled me to build fast, and maintain a performant codebase.

My recent project is Mathesar, which has a large frontend codebase in Svelte + Typescript [1]. It's also open-source so you can check out the codebase. We use pretty much all of Svelte's features and we even implemented a full component library. Here's an old discussion for deciding which frontend library to use for Mathesar, where we selected Svelte [2].

We have had to establish a number of patterns (including around reactivity) so that new contributors don't break things, which happens more often than you think.

Svelte's primary issue is a lack of established patterns, which makes it easy for new Svelte developers to get things wrong. React has a number of such patterns due to it's massive community. I believe as Svelte's community keeps growing and more projects choosing Svelte, this would be tackled.

[1]: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar [2]: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/discussions/55

[pier25]

> One example is being able to pass templates around.

Yeah I agree. It's not a big deal but I kinda miss this from JSX.

There was some discussion about adding templates or even components inside other components but it all feels very inelegant and not very Svelty.

https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/2940

[pier25]

Also this:

https://github.com/sveltejs/rfcs/pull/34

[wibblewobble124]

I think if something is intuitive after 5 years then it wasn’t intuitive, you’ve just adapted.

[pavish]

I think I didn't phrase my statement correctly.

Here's more clarity on what I was attempting to say: I had to understand the internal working of the reactive statements inorder to use it the right way and it took me a building a couple smaller projects to completion to get there. I believe this was because at the time I built them, I did not have enough references and projects where similar problems were tackled.

After I understood how it worked, which was about 3 to 6 months into using Svelte v3, I found it rather simple and intuitive. I've been working with Svelte for nearly 5 years overall. It did not take me 5 years to find it intuitive.