|
I’m mainly a C++ developer, not a frontend developer (though I dabble), and when I have a choice of multiple approaches the first thing I do is go to godbolt.org, implement MWEs and compare the assembly. I also do a lot of code generation, and my absolute goal is to have it write code that I’d write if I were doing it by hand. That’s pretty key for me. If the output is better, then good. If the output is doing a bunch of stuff it doesn’t need to be doing because it’s taking my specific use case and making it conform with its own model for doing generic things, I don’t like it. I was a web developer back when tables for layout, HTML attribute soup for styling, and applets for interactivity were going out of fashion. Semantic HTML and CSS for layout and styling and JS for interactivity were coming into fashion. Divs for layout, class soup for styling, and JS frameworks for interactivity hadn’t yet become mainstream when I stopped. So my default is lean HTML, lean CSS, raw JS. Maybe JQuery if needs be. It’s an outdated default, but it’s mine. The thing is, I get great load times and performance for what I need. What I need is normal dashboard stuff - though because of the nature of the field I work in, it condenses a lot of information onto a page and that information is updating many times per second. I don’t seem to get enough performance from the frontend frameworks I’ve tried. I don’t know if it comes from code bloat, or deep call stacks through god knows how many levels of indirection, the way DOM updates are issued, or something else - but it has just never seemed worth the learning curve to end up with something I can’t do myself with admittedly a lot of work. As such, I find this review helpful. Svelte has caught my attention and I want to give it a go, but if the output is bloaty then that’s a red flag for me. If it’s bloaty because it isn’t doing backflips through the call stack, but is inlining code - that’s familiar territory and certainly something I can deal with. |
This is fine but having spent a decade of my career doing this, I would never advocate for it in an app with any kind of frontend complexity or a chance to grow into it. The frameworks mostly obviate the need to understand layout thrashing, resource cleanup, and retained state conflicts in the DOM. If you're doing simple stuff these don't matter but they're challenging to fix and more challenging to stay fixed when a group is contributing.
> Svelte has caught my attention and I want to give it a go, but if the output is bloaty then that’s a red flag for me
Your use case is a pretty good fit for Svelte and you're likely to get output you'd find acceptable and given your preferences I think you're more likely to prefer its sensibilities over other frameworks that could provide the perf you're looking for. The tradeoff is kind of like the tradeoff between monomorphization vs virtual dispatch. The Svelte compiler is basically inlining the update code instead of using shared code in a runtime.