Svelte and the Future of Front-end Development

First released in 2016, the Svelte Web framework has steadily gained popularity as an alternative approach to building Web applications, one that prides itself on being more intuitive (and less verbose) than the current framework du jour, Facebook's React . You can say that it reaches back to the era before the web app — when desktop and server applications were compiled — to make the web app easier to develop and more enjoyable to user. In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we interview the creator of Svelte himself, Rich Harris . Harris started out not as a web developer, but as a journalist who created the framework to do immersive web journalism. So we were interested in that. In addition to delving into history, we also discussed the current landscape of Web frameworks, the Web's Document Object Model, the way React.js updates variables, the value of TypeScript, and the importance SvelteKit. We also chatted about why Vercel , where Harris now works maintaining Svelte, wants to make a home for Svelte. TNS Editor Joab Jackson hosted this conversation. Below are a few excerpts from our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. So set the stage for us. What was the point that inspired you to create Svelte? To fully tell the story, we need to go way back into the mists of time, back to when I started programming. My background is in journalism. And about a decade ago, I was working in a newsroom at a financial publication in London. I was very inspired by some of the interactive journalism that was being produced at places like the New York Times, but also the BBC and the Guardian and lots of other news organizations, where they were using Flash and increasingly JavaScript, to tell these data rich interactive stories that couldn't really be done any other way. And to me, this felt like the future of journalism, it's something that was using the full power of the web platform as a storytelling medium in a way that just hadn't been done before. And I was very excited about all that, and I wanted a piece of it. So I started learning JavaScript with the help of the help of some some friends, and discovered that it's really difficult. Particularly if you're doing things that have a lot of interactivity. If you're managing lots of state that can be updated in lots of different ways, you end up writing what is often referred to as spaghetti code. And so I started building a toolkit, really, for myself. And this was a project called Reactive, short for interactive, something out of a out of a Neal Stephenson book, in fact, and it actually got a little bit of traction, not it was never huge, but you know, it was my first foray into open source, and it got used in a few different places. And I maintained that for some years, and eventually, I left that company and joined the Guardian in the U.K. And we used Reactive to build interactive pieces of journalism there, I transferred to the U.S. to continue at the guardian in New York. And we use directive quite heavily there as well. After a while, though, it became apparent that, you know, as with many frameworks of that era, it had certain flaws. A lot of these frameworks were built for an era in which desktop computing was prevalent. And we were now in firmly in this age of mobile, first, web development. And these frameworks weren't really up to the task, primarily because they were just too big, they were too big, and they were too bulky and they were too slow. And so in 2016, I started working on what was essentially a successor to that project. And we chose the name Svelte because it has all the right connotations. It's elegant, it's sophisticated. And the idea was to basically provide the same kind of development experience that people were used to, but change the was that translated into the experience end users have when they run it in the browser. It did this by adopting techniques from the compiler world. The code that you write doesn't need to be the code that actually runs in the browser. Svelte was really one of the first frameworks to lean into the compiler paradigm. And as a result, we were able to do things with much less JavaScript, and in a way that was much more performant, which is very important if you're producing these kinds of interactive stories that typically involve like a lot of data, a lot of animation Can you talk a bit about more about the compiler aspect? How does that work with a web application or web page? So, you know, browsers run JavaScript. And like nowadays, they can run WASM , too. But JavaScript is the language that you need to write stuff in if you want to have interactivity on a web page. But that doesn't mean that you need to write JavaScript, if you can design a language that allows you to describe user interfaces in a more natural way, then the compiler could turn that intention into the code that actually runs. And so you get all the benefits of declarative programming but without the drawbacks that h