Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)
by throwaway894345 on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @11:03AM
(#27676810)
> If your app is spending a significant amount of time doing virtual DOM diffs, then sure. The virtual DOM overhead is a problem. However, saying it’s pure overhead and then not qualifying how much is a catastrophic failure of reasoning.
I think you're interpreting their messaging as "Svelte's compiled DOM is faster than virtual DOMs ergo Svelte is appropriate for every application" whereas the implication is certainly "Svlete's compiled DOM is faster than virtual DOMs ergo Svelte may be a good choice for applications that are constrained by virtual DOM". I don't think it's a reasoning failure, but rather a misunderstanding (an inadvertent straw man on your part).
> Svelte probably hasn’t taken over because the real world isn’t synthetic benchmarks and most apps have more significant concerns than how many times a component can update per second - and even then, in my experience React is more than capable of doing a decent job here
I think this makes a fair amount of sense. Often an incumbent needs to be quite a lot better in order to justify the learning curve, and I'm not sure that Svelte is. That said, I've been part of a lot of Python projects because Python's problems don't often manifest for new projects, but rather at scale (real workloads suffer from Python's poor performance, development velocity decreases at scale due to type annotations, package managers crawl as the dependency tree grows beyond the "toy" category, etc). I wonder if perhaps there's a similar effect in which React is "good enough" for new projects but not enough for
> The irony is that Svelte compiles code that will then run on a JIT under a JavaScript engine. That’s strictly overhead.
I don't understand this claim. In order for it to be "strictly overhead" we have to assume that Svelte's compilation step has no benefit i.e., the output code doesn't reduce the JIT's workload but even more than that, the output code has no advantages (i.e., performance advantages) over React?
> I know this article is from 2018, but it never landed well for me, and Svelte’s virtually unchanged irrelevance should be some kind of cautionary tale. I don’t think there is anything wrong with Svelte. But this isn’t how you sell a framework to programmers, in my opinion.
The way you sell a framework to programmers is largely by the backing of huge tech companies who use it in large, noteworthy projects. That's presumably not an option available to Svelte developers?
I think you're interpreting their messaging as "Svelte's compiled DOM is faster than virtual DOMs ergo Svelte is appropriate for every application" whereas the implication is certainly "Svlete's compiled DOM is faster than virtual DOMs ergo Svelte may be a good choice for applications that are constrained by virtual DOM". I don't think it's a reasoning failure, but rather a misunderstanding (an inadvertent straw man on your part).
> Svelte probably hasn’t taken over because the real world isn’t synthetic benchmarks and most apps have more significant concerns than how many times a component can update per second - and even then, in my experience React is more than capable of doing a decent job here
I think this makes a fair amount of sense. Often an incumbent needs to be quite a lot better in order to justify the learning curve, and I'm not sure that Svelte is. That said, I've been part of a lot of Python projects because Python's problems don't often manifest for new projects, but rather at scale (real workloads suffer from Python's poor performance, development velocity decreases at scale due to type annotations, package managers crawl as the dependency tree grows beyond the "toy" category, etc). I wonder if perhaps there's a similar effect in which React is "good enough" for new projects but not enough for
> The irony is that Svelte compiles code that will then run on a JIT under a JavaScript engine. That’s strictly overhead.
I don't understand this claim. In order for it to be "strictly overhead" we have to assume that Svelte's compilation step has no benefit i.e., the output code doesn't reduce the JIT's workload but even more than that, the output code has no advantages (i.e., performance advantages) over React?
> I know this article is from 2018, but it never landed well for me, and Svelte’s virtually unchanged irrelevance should be some kind of cautionary tale. I don’t think there is anything wrong with Svelte. But this isn’t how you sell a framework to programmers, in my opinion.
The way you sell a framework to programmers is largely by the backing of huge tech companies who use it in large, noteworthy projects. That's presumably not an option available to Svelte developers?