143: Rich Harris - Svelte and Defending the Modern Web

In this episode of Full Stack Radio, I talked to Rich Harris about Svelte, Sapper and his recent article, In Defense of the Modern Web. This is Full Stack Radio episode one forty three. So, the reason I wanted to have you on the show is, first of all, I have, recently started playing with Svelte a little bit for the first time and realized that we never talked about it on the show, and I thought that would be really cool to talk about. And, I also think it would be cool to talk to you about kind of building modern web applications opinionated voice about that sort of thing on the Internet. And it's always interesting to kinda hear people's takes and how people kind of imagine us doing this sort of stuff in the future and what direction we should be pushing things in. So maybe the best place to start though would just be talking, about Svelte itself. And I think that'll probably lead into, kinda how you think people should be building stuff for the web because I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, things there that are related. So so what is like the pitch for Svelte these days after, you know, having time to refine it over the last few years? Still working on the pitch. Honestly, it's a little bit of a difficult thing to to summarize. Mhmm. What I found works best is to try and, put it in the context of other projects that people are generally more familiar with. So a lot of people have used React. A lot of people have used Vue. And they're used to this idea of building web applications out of self contained components, where you have the markup for a particular piece of your UI together with the styles that belong with that markup and the behavior that controls how you can interact with that markup and and what it will change into in response to changes in the state of your app. Svelte is is basically like that. It's a thing that allows you to build applications, out of components. The the big difference between Svelte and those other projects is that it primarily thinks of itself as a compiler. Whereas a traditional framework will take your declaratively author components and then sort of of turn them into instructions to the browser at run time. Svelte tries to do as much of the work as possible at build time. So you integrate it into your usual build step using Webpack or Rollup or whatever module bundle you're using, and it will take the components that you've authored and and literally rewrite it as vanilla JavaScript. And through that, it's able to achieve typically much better performance than a traditional framework. And because we don't need to carry around, you know, a virtual DOM diffing engine or any of the stuff that you normally expect to include, your application will typically be …