Hey everyone, Rich from the Svelte team here. Coordinating all the moving parts for yesterday's launch (last few PRs, doc updates and redirects, CLI release, launch blog post...) turned out to be a bit of a slog so I'll confess I turned off my laptop and went for a beer as soon as it was done instead of sticking around to engage in HN threads and Reddit and so on.
Honestly, I didn't expect the release to generate much conversation at all. There's a lot less focus/interest in front-end frameworks generally these days, for obvious reasons, so I figured the median reaction would be 'oh, the Svelte team are still shipping? good for them' and not much more. It's a joy to see the conversation here whether it's from happy users, or people who prefer different things, or people who have fully outsourced the writing-the-code bit to LLMs and straight up don't care about the underlying tools any more.
Which I totally understand! As framework authors we're very persnickety about the details of the code, so we've been on the slower end of the LLM adoption curve, but even we're starting to delegate more of the work to agents. If you're prompting an app into existence it's natural not to care that much about the particulars. But a question I've seen several times here, and in the zeitgeist more generally — 'in a world of agents why should I care about Svelte vs React vs whatever?' — deserves an answer.
And it's this: your app will be _better_ if you use Svelte. Your JavaScript bundle will use fewer bytes, your server-side rendering will take fewer milliseconds, and your users will reap the benefits: faster, more efficient apps. For all that the agentic revolution has created a huge _quantity_ of software, the _quality_ of the average app stubbornly refuses to budge. If anything, software is becoming less reliable. I think we've all felt that. Using a framework that treats things like accessibility and progressive enhancement as core concerns will help you steer towards better outcomes. (Your agent will use fewer tokens as well.)
Of course, this was always the pitch! Agents don't change that. And that's why we're still shipping and still sweating the details. We have some stuff coming up that we're unreasonably excited about — we really care about this stuff, and we're very grateful to be part of a community who shares that passion. Thank you for the support, it means the world to us.
Awesome, Rich. Been a diehard Sveltehead since 2022 - and yes, just because agents default to React doesn't make it better! Thanks for making the best JS framework of them all
For me the annoying thing is that everyone seems to assume using SvelteKit by default when looking something up about svelte. No, i don't want to use this folder based routing or server side rendering, i want to ise it to write a frontend for a backend.
Thanks for all your hard work! We've almost exclusively used Svelte / sk for our client work at Niftic for years now. Excited to dig in on v3
Even though I delegate more and more to coding agents I've stayed with Svelte(kit) for any project where I can choose. It's always been a breeze to work with coming from an Angular background and (imho) the average quality of the resulting code (quality of training samples I guess) is just better than with most other frameworks I've seen.
I totally agree with you bundle size and performance matter and I look forward to working with remote functions.
Glad to see you and the team are still at it! The accessibility guardrails in Svelte are in particular something that I imagine steers agents in the right direction. And it would be sad if the frontend ecosystem converged on React for the LLM benefits given that it's definitely not optimal performance-wise, especially on slower mobile devices.
rich_harris · · focus · HN ↗
Honestly, I didn't expect the release to generate much conversation at all. There's a lot less focus/interest in front-end frameworks generally these days, for obvious reasons, so I figured the median reaction would be 'oh, the Svelte team are still shipping? good for them' and not much more. It's a joy to see the conversation here whether it's from happy users, or people who prefer different things, or people who have fully outsourced the writing-the-code bit to LLMs and straight up don't care about the underlying tools any more.
Which I totally understand! As framework authors we're very persnickety about the details of the code, so we've been on the slower end of the LLM adoption curve, but even we're starting to delegate more of the work to agents. If you're prompting an app into existence it's natural not to care that much about the particulars. But a question I've seen several times here, and in the zeitgeist more generally — 'in a world of agents why should I care about Svelte vs React vs whatever?' — deserves an answer.
And it's this: your app will be _better_ if you use Svelte. Your JavaScript bundle will use fewer bytes, your server-side rendering will take fewer milliseconds, and your users will reap the benefits: faster, more efficient apps. For all that the agentic revolution has created a huge _quantity_ of software, the _quality_ of the average app stubbornly refuses to budge. If anything, software is becoming less reliable. I think we've all felt that. Using a framework that treats things like accessibility and progressive enhancement as core concerns will help you steer towards better outcomes. (Your agent will use fewer tokens as well.)
Of course, this was always the pitch! Agents don't change that. And that's why we're still shipping and still sweating the details. We have some stuff coming up that we're unreasonably excited about — we really care about this stuff, and we're very grateful to be part of a community who shares that passion. Thank you for the support, it means the world to us.
templar_snow · · focus · HN ↗
Fergusonb · · focus · HN ↗
Svelte / Sveltekit helped programming "click" for me , and years later I'm doing work I love for people who appreciate it.
SK is my favorite starting point for almost everything I build.
skeletal88 · · focus · HN ↗
0xblinq · · focus · HN ↗
cfowles · · focus · HN ↗
Huppie · · focus · HN ↗
Even though I delegate more and more to coding agents I've stayed with Svelte(kit) for any project where I can choose. It's always been a breeze to work with coming from an Angular background and (imho) the average quality of the resulting code (quality of training samples I guess) is just better than with most other frameworks I've seen.
I totally agree with you bundle size and performance matter and I look forward to working with remote functions.
All this to say: Congrats on the release!
nolanl · · focus · HN ↗
cicko · · focus · HN ↗
zyf · · focus · HN ↗
Can't wait for the next release