Is Svelte The Next Big Thing in JavaScript Frameworks?
For years now, the role of frameworks has been to make the process of web development faster and easier. Over the decades, lots of front-end JavaScript frameworks have been launched in the industry but not many have stood the test of time. With strong corporate backing and innovative features, Angular, React and Vue have remained the top three players for quite some time now.
However, after the release of version 3 in 2019, Svelte suddenly started becoming a buzzword in the developer community. The Stack Overflow Survey 2021 revealed that Svelte is now the most loved web framework. It has also garnered over 55.7k stars on GitHub.
How did it become so popular so soon? What is so special about Svelte that the majority of developers love it more than other web frameworks?
Before we get to the answers, let’s first understand what differentiates Svelte from other popular frontend frameworks.
The Popularity of Virtual DOM in JavaScript Frameworks
When frameworks like React and Vue were launched, the web development ecosystem was thrilled with their virtual DOM feature. It was a new, more efficient way to optimize rendering changes in a web app.
With virtual DOM, you can create a memory-only version of the real DOM in your web app. Whenever there is a change in the state of your app, the changes in the UI are first shown in the virtual DOM while the actual DOM stays the same. Then, the framework compares the new virtual DOM with the real DOM, observes the changes between the two, and finally renders only the changed elements on the UI.
By doing this, you ensure that the entire UI doesn’t need to be re-rendered. Hence, the web app with a virtual DOM results in faster performance.
However, with time, it became evident that even creating a virtual DOM and comparing it with the actual DOM is quite time-consuming. There was still scope to improve things further and the creators of Svelte took that opportunity.
Enter Svelte – A Compiler
Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte, is a well-known personality in the developer community.
In a 2016 article, he claimed that front-end web developers were soon going to stop using JavaScript frameworks that work on runtime. He believes that these frameworks contribute to a larger size of the application. When a user interacts with an app built with a framework like React, Angular, or Vue, its performance is not only impacted by the network but also the JavaScript engine that takes too long to parse the code and interpret it.
Therefore, he strongly advocated for a framework that doesn’t work on runtime. And soon, he released Svelte – the first JavaScript framework that works as a compiler.
As a compiler, Svelte ensures that it compiles the application code at build time. So when there is a change in the app state, the browser directly receives the pre-converted Vanilla JS code instead of having to do all the work by itself.
In addition to reducing the work that the browser has to do, Svelte also ensures that there aren’t any shipping runtime or abstraction layers between the browser and the app. It’s almost as if the framework isn’t even a part of the app after the build process. That is why Svelte is also popularly called ‘the disappearing framework.’
In contrast to other JavaScript frameworks, Svelte significantly reduces the burden on the browser in order to keep the app state in alignment with the DOM. As a result, web apps built with Svelte have a much smaller app size and yield at least 30% faster performance than the apps that make use of virtual DOM.
Key Advantages of Svelte That Make it A Developer-Friendly Framework
One of the strongest features of Svelte is that it enables you to produce more with less. That is, you need to write a much smaller piece of code to create functionality in Svelte, compared to other JavaScript frameworks.
In fact, as proven by the Svelte creator Rich Harris, you need to write 40% less code to make a component using Svelte, as opposed to using a framework like React. This improves the developer’s productivity drastically.
Secondly, it’s much easier to bind classes and variables in Svelte and you don’t need to create custom logic every time you bind classes.
Moreover, state management in Svelte is much more efficient due to its built-in context API and svelte stores. Unlike many other JavaScript frameworks, you don’t need to employ a large number of third-party libraries to manage the application state.
Lastly, Svelte has a very simple syntax which is easy to learn for anyone who knows how to write HTML or JavaScript code. Compared to JavaScript frameworks like Angular and React, Svelte is much more beginner-friendly.
Future of Svelte – What Does it Look Like?
Svelte is an efficient front-end framework that helps build incredibly light and fast web applications. The concept of true reactivity in Svelte has already garnered a lot of attention from the developer community.
For now, the Svelte community is small but growing steadily. While many small to medium-scale apps have benefited immensely from Svelte, the framework is yet to be evolved in order to facilitate the efficient development and performance of large, complex apps.
However, from how things look currently, Svelte is certainly going to make it into the list of top three JavaScript frameworks in the near future.
Is Svelte The Right Choice For Your Project?
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