Svelte Radio Ben McCann on Sapper and SvelteKit
Ben McCann joins us to talk about the next version of Sapper as well as SvelteKit. We touch on migration from Sapper to SvelteKit, what's going to happen with Sapper as well as some good news for developers using Webpack.
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Transcript:
Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 0:00
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Svelte radio. Today we have another guest for you all, but first introductions. I'm Kevin, I run Svelte radio and Svelte school, and I'm involved in the Svelte community in general.
Shawn 0:18
I'm Shawn, same here, I guess. I don't read anything. But I guess I've been working on recently the Svelte actions package, trying to have a good set of defaults for Svelte to export. So it inspires people to use actions more. That's me.
Antony 0:34
I'm Anthony. I'm a CTO of biank also stopped maintainer along with our guests today, which is Ben McCann, who is also Svelte maintainer, a very, very recent one, in fact, not not recently. It's been a while now. So Ben has come in on the back of a huge amount of prs. And he produces them so fast. And he's really pushed the development of stealth itself, but also sapper significantly forward. And yeah, what else? What else is this? There's a lot to Ben. He's extremely polite, nice. And I really, really like that. It's quite refreshing to find the person. And oh, I have to Ben.
Ben McCann 1:13
Yeah. It's great to be here with you all today. Thanks for for having me on the show. So how I get so much done, I don't have a day job right now. So that gives me a little more time. I started a start up a few years ago. And so I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm in between companies right now trying to figure out my next one. And, you know, I picked up Svelte to kind of refresh my tech skills and our startup, we were using Angular and don't want to do that again. So it's trying to figure out what's new in the landscape, and hadn't been coding for a number of years as a more of a management role. So I just want to kind of get caught up on two things, and really enjoyed been using Svelte these past few months,
Shawn 2:02
I was just just curious how you first heard about it, because you know, it might someone in your position, you might just go for react as sort of the the most popular framework of the day.
Ben McCann 2:13
Yeah. So I mean, one of the ideas that I was experimenting with was for a content based site where I thought that this speed was going to be really important, and performance was going to be really important. And so I really liked that with Svelte, you didn't have to download a runtime, like you do with react. And so, you know, the initial page loads were a lot faster. So that's kind of how I got involved. And then, you know, with snapper, there were a lot of other really nice performance improvements. And those were some of the the first things I started working on when I got involved in sapper. So, you know, one of the things that we did was we added preload headers. So when you first visit a page will fetch all the assets that you need for that page. So instead of having to wait for if one script depends on another script, instead of having to wait for the first script to run and fetch that second script, the page will automatically fetch both of those at the beginning. And so we we kind of crawl your dependency tree and make sure that those are all fetched at the beginning. And then, you know, it's also got CSS code splitting, which is something that, you know, had a few bugs in the past recent releases getting that all worked out. But I think that's really gotten to a very nice place now, where we have, you know, it's always had JavaScript code splitting. And now the CSS is really, I think, a lot easier to manage as well. And so with all that code splitting, you know, it's a really nice performance benefit of using sapper.
Antony 4:00
So what the one thing I want to ask him, as I mentioned, the intro, intro that you you were intrapreneur. But also, I believe, and I could be wrong here. But I think you're also a VC of sorts. Is that right?
Ben McCann 4:10
Yeah, I've been doing a bunch of investing as an angel investor. And so I've invested in probably about two dozen companies at this point.
Antony 4:20
Wow. Very cool.
Ben McCann 4:22
As far as I know, none of them use Svelte but I'll spread.
Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 4:27
I gotta push, you gotta push for for Svelte.
Antony 4:31
Cool. Any, any, any successes? Yeah. Those that Funchal,
Ben McCann 4:35
um, we actually pretty. One of the first companies we invested in pretty interesting company, they're doing water propelled propulsion in space. And they just announced that they're IPL ng, so they announced that late last year and that should happen sometime q1 we think
Antony 4:57
very cool.
Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 4:58
Wow. I wonder how that works. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that seems crazy. It's,
Ben McCann 5:04
it's got a nice a lot of nice benefits, like a lot of the chemicals that are used for propulsion, traditionally are very toxic. And so that's not not probably not the main benefit of doing this, but it's a nice side benefit. So the idea is basically that, you know, if you're going to launch a satellite into orbit or something on SpaceX, they kind of drop you into a number of like default orbits. But then if you want to get to your own custom orbit fill, fill act is like a shuttle to get you to your final destination.
Kevin Åberg Kultalahti 5:42
That's cool. All right, so sapper. Is that point? 28. Right now, is that that's not the last version. Right?
Ben McCann 5:50
So we've got one more, at least in the works. Zero Point 29 is coming up soon. And, you know, obviously, there's there's been a lot of talk about Svelte kit. And so that's where a lot of the development focuses right now. But in the meantime, there's still a lot of prs that we've been getting for smaller issues in sapper that we wanted to try to get in and get another release out. So I think, you know, probably the biggest highlight is for all our TypeScript users. we've, we've gotten, I think, probably like four or five changes in two separate 29 for TypeScript definition improvements, which will be a really nice quality of life improvement for our TypeScript users. TypeScript supports pretty new within Svelte in general. And so there's there's a lot of other places in the Svelte ecosystem where we've been making a lot of TypeScript improvements as well. But But sapper is definitely one of them. And then, you know, I think the other place in in sapper zero point 29, where we've seen a lot of improvements are in the router. So a lot of fairly minor bug fixes. But But things that that are just kind of nice usability improvements. There's been a couple scroll tracking bug fixes that w...