143: Rich Harris - Svelte and Defending the Modern Web

Topics include:

• What is Svelte and how is it different than other JS frameworks in the space?
• What special behavior does the Svelte compiler layer on top of vanilla JS syntax and why?
• Why the lack of render functions in Svelte isn't a real problem in practice
• What are you giving up when you choose to build your application with something like Rails instead of JavaScript?
• Why should we be trying to write our applications in a single language, and why should it be JS?
• What's wrong with striving to write an application entirely in a language like Ruby instead of entirely in JS?
• Why HEY doesn't really make a good argument against the modern web
• Thoughts on bundle sizes, code-splitting, and why aggressive code-splitting is still better than frequent round trips to a server-rendered app
• How Svelte and Sapper handle SSR
• Why page transitions are the killer argument for building SPAs if we want to be able to compete with native experiences
• Should we be thinking about JavaScript applications as native applications in terms of offline-support and eventual consistency, or should we keep thinking of them as webpages that depend on the network?

Links:

• Svelte
• Sapper
• "Second-guessing the modern web"
• "In defense of the modern web"

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