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by steve_taylor 1062 days ago
> not mature

Svelte was first released in 2016 and has become bigger than its original creator, Rich Harris. It has quite a thriving ecosystem and a big community. The tooling around it is more mature than React's has ever been.

> surface is so small

I actually find the opposite to be true. React still has a relatively small API surface area. One-way data flow makes it easier to understand. However, a smaller surface means arguably less expressivity, so I think Svelte's bigger learning curve is worth it. You can learn about 90% of React in a weekend and be productive. You can learn about 20% of Svelte in a weekend and also be somewhat productive, but you need to learn about 60-70% more to use Svelte as it's intended, rather than as a React alternative.

3 comments

I think Svelte has a much smaller learning curve, personally. If you know Javascript there's hardly anything to learn.
This is wrong in so many levels. You need to learn useState,useEffects in react.

You only need to learn how to put {varName} in svelte.

useState and useEffect are quite simple small elegant API. It does not mean it's very easy to use for newbie. Maybe like Lisp?
Oh sure, useState and useEffect are very simple. Your app built upon them, on the other hand…
You don't need to learn useEffect until you need to plug arbitrary js libs and components into react. That's the intended use of useEffect. Using it for anything else is usually a bad idea.
How can you "fetch something when your state change ?". It's the main use case for useEffect.
You can just trigger fetch in the function that does the state change.
Agreed, this is the correct approach. Overusing effects makes control flow difficult to understand and has many unintended consequences. The misuse of effects is so widespread the React team had to address it with Strict mode in React 18.
How is Svelte intended to be used that is so hard to learn?