Jerod & the gang discuss the news (Astro 3.0, Vercel + Astro, Python in Excel) then play eight crazy rounds of HeadLIES! Headline or headLIE? You decide…

Congrats to the entire Svelte team (and contributors) for this release, which culminates two years of effort:

We’re so excited to share this release with you. It’s the culmination of thousands of hours of work, both from the Svelte core team and the wider community, and we think it’s the most enjoyable way to build production-grade websites, whether you’re a solo developer working on a small project or part of a large team.

Tan Li Hau gave this talk at Front Conference, but the videos won’t be out for a year (!), so he gave the talk again and posted it to his YouTube channel. Here’s how he described the video to us:

Watch the <1 hour video to write a simplified Svelte compiler <300 lines of code is amazing! Easy to follow, inspiring, and gives a great overview of how to write a compiler.

When Rich Harris was last on JS Party, he wondered aloud:

“Should I learn Rust? Should we rewrite the Svelte compiler in Rust?” Maybe it’s a terrible idea, I don’t know, but I think it’s at least worth investigating.

Well, the effort we’re linking to here isn’t by Rich, but another member of the Svelte community. Their reasoning:

My main reason for doing this, is to compile Svelte without Node.js and possibly use Deno instead.

And the state of the project:

This is still a big work in progress. I’m mainly working on this for fun and learning. I came up with the name rustle by combining rust and svelte (ruslte => rustle). The project is open to naming suggestions!

Million makes creating user interfaces as easy as React, but with faster performance and smaller bundle size for the end user. By computing the user interface beforehand with a compiler, Million reduces the overhead of traditional Virtual DOM.

Okay cool… but why should I use Million if I can just use Preact if I need something a bit more lightweight?

While alternative libraries like Preact reduce bundle sizes by efficient code design, Million takes it a step further by leveraging compilation to make a quantum leap in improving bundle size and render speed.

Watch the video or get started with the docs.

The Documentary tells the story of how Svelte came to be, what makes Svelte different, and how it changes the game as a JavaScript framework. Filmed in locations throughout Europe and the US, it features Svelte’s creator Rich Harris and members from the core community who contributed to making Svelte what it is today.

Lots of familiar faces in this one.

A Svelte app that helps you mix, blend, modify, or just get the info on every color under the rainbow. 🌈

Rich Harris joins Amal & Amelia for a Svelte deep-dive! What’s it all about? Why might you pick it over React and friends? What up with SvelteKit? Rich is working on it full-time now?! Will even more questions be answered?

Cool move by Vercel. Rich says:

so happy about what this means for svelte’s future. it’ll be the same independent, pluralistic project as before, but with Vercel’s backing we can get ✨ a m b i t i o u s ✨

Congrats to the Svelte community! We’ll surely dicsuss this move and what all it means when Rich joins us on JS Party in early December.

Russel Goldenberg & Caitlyn Ralph from The Pudding join Amelia & Nick to talk about how they create data-driven, interactive articles, how the team works on both The Pudding’s data journalism articles and Polygraph’s client work. We also dive into how the team works with contractors and how the company manages itself using a Holocratic method.

Nick Reese joins the party to tell us all about Elder.js, his opinionated static site generator and web framework built with SEO in mind. Elder.js was purpose-built with large, content-heavy websites in mind and already serves in many production capacities. We discuss imposter syndrome, the startup/product mindset, Svelte’s virtues, and much more.

Jack Franklin rebuilt his (p)React-based pomodoro app in Svelte and wrote up a nice comparison of his experiences with both:

This is not a post declaring Svelte to be better than React, or vice-versa. This is a post where I’ll tell you about my preferences, and what I find easier or harder with either framework. I’m not here to pick a fight!

Mat Ryer makes the case for passive user preferences, which is where you store their last used setting for them without asking and then set it as the default the next time they interact with that part of your app. He then goes on to describe how they accomplish this with Svelte. Good stuff!

If you want to hear more about how they’re using Svelte and Go to build Pace, we did a pair of podcasts on the topic earlier this year.

Orta Therox, making the big announcement on behalf of the Svelte team:

We think it’ll give you a much nicer development experience — one that also scales beautifully to larger Svelte code bases — regardless of whether you use TypeScript or JavaScript.

Up until now TypeScript was usable with Svelte, but not officially supported by the project. What does that official support look like?

• You can use TypeScript inside your <script> blocks — just add the lang="ts" attribute
• Components with TypeScript can be type-checked with the svelte-check command
• You get autocompletion hints and type-checking as you’re writing components, even in expressions inside markup
• TypeScript files understand the Svelte component API — no more red squiggles when you import a .svelte file into a .ts module

I know a lot of people have been waiting for this. Congrats to all involved on a big release!

We often try new frameworks and tools in side projects or throwaway contexts, but you don’t learn that much about a thing until you use it to build something real. That’s why we have Mat Ryer and David Hernandez joining us to share their experience of using Svelte while building their new startup, Pace.dev.

This is a well-reasoned piece that includes Svelte’s advantages, disadvantages, and drawbacks today.

Is using bleeding edge tech risky and foolish? How much blood are we talking about? My experience tells me Svelte is a safe choice, more leading edge than bleeding. However I’m more risk tolerant than most people, I have a lot of experience with JS frameworks, and our team is motivated, so we can deal with rough edges.

Dániel Kantor:

My goal is to start a community-driven language-learning platform that gives it’s users and contributors a way to influence it’s future and adapt it to special requirements.

Once course content is properly decoupled from the software, it should be possible to experiment with alternative ways of using course content: for example, the creation of audiobooks or print material.

The Spanish course is already started for demo purposes

The goal of svelvet is to make svelte play nicely with snowpack and web_modules.

As of today, svelte depends on a loader for webpack or rollup which compiles your svelte components into individual js files. Since snowpack’s goal is to avoid the need for a bundler, we can’t use those loaders, but we can use svelte’s internal compiler api to do 95% of the work for us. On top of that, svelvet adds automatic file watching to recompile your svelte files just like a loader would, but much faster!

I’m not gonna lie, any green field that offers a super light build process is looking pretty stinkin’ green these days. That being said, there’s a reason we call it the bleeding edge.

Jerod, Divya, Chris, KBall, & Nick ring in the new year with our 2020 predictions, wish lists, & resolutions. Will Chrome’s browser market share decrease? Will Svelte (or a Svelte-alike) continue to trend? Will Jerod finally write some TypeScript?! Listen along and let us know your thoughts on the matters.

Results are in for the 2019 State of JS survey. I’ve been digging through charts to see what I can see. Here are 7 insights that jumped off the page to me.

A nice side-by-side comparison of a simple todo app built with both frameworks. If you’ve experimented with these tools, you’ll probably find this article too elementary to be useful, but if either is unfamiliar to you, definitely give it a read.

After several months of being just days away, we are over the moon to announce the stable release of Svelte 3. This is a huge release representing hundreds of hours of work by many people in the Svelte community, including invaluable feedback from beta testers who have helped shape the design every step of the way.

Lots of folks (myself included) have been eagerly awaiting this release after Rich teed it up on The Changelog #332. We’d love to hear your first impressions!

Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.