Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)

Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by Panther34543 on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @12:32PM (#27678245)

I spent part of last Saturday going through the Svelte tutorial, and I really liked the framework.

I then was looking at recommendations for building fully functional web apps, and the official recommendation was to use "Svelte Kit". I began the tutorial for that, and was surprised at how the philosophy of that framework seemed to completely contradict the core Svelte framework. It was extremely odd and unappealing, and killed my newly gained enthusiasm for Svelte.

Has anyone built full web apps without Svelte Kit (previously Sapper)?

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by arxpoetica on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @01:43PM (#27679269)

You absolutely 100% do not have to use Svelte Kit.

Svelte Kit is just the equivalent of (an opinionated) Next.js, Gatsyby, or Nuxt.js framework. Those frameworks are also incredibly opinionated on purpose.

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by Panther34543 on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @12:39PM (#27690629)

One of the things I came to enjoy regarding React was that the router was separate and kept the core React API small. I had hoped that something similar was the norm for Svelte, but it was quite clear that the official recommendation was to use SvelteKit.

Have you built production apps with just Svelte? Is the tooling and feature set good enough to use Svelte alone in an actual app?

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by panta on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @02:53AM (#27685693)

I agree. SvelteKit should not be advertised as the standard way to use svelte imho. Fortunately it’s not necessary to use svelte. I’ve some quite complex apps built using svelte, all without SvelteKit/sapper (I am of the “explicit is better than implicit” school of thought).

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by Panther34543 on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @12:35PM (#27690569)

So, what do you use for something like a router?

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by panta on Thursday July 01, 2021 @02:34AM (#27696835)

I’ve used page.js and some other generic ones. It’s up to you, svelte is not bound to anything in particular.

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by davidwparker on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:14PM (#27679629)

I built https://www.listenaddict.com/ with Sapper. It was a good experience. That said, all of my other apps are using Kit, and I'm finding that experience even nicer.

What did you find unappealing about Kit?

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by Panther34543 on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @12:37PM (#27690598)

This post [0] sums up my general feeling toward SvelteKit. It seemed very opinionated and very restrictive, two qualities which seemed opposite the philosophy of core Svelte.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/ni9g5d/svelte_vs_...

Do you have concerns with using SvelteKit in production? It's still in Beta last I checked.

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by davidwparker on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @02:55PM (#27692202)

Yes, it's very much in beta! And if that's a concern for you, then I'd stick with Sapper or Elder.js or another.

That said, I think the replies covered the concern pretty well. For me, I don't really have any concerns with it. I don't find it very opinionated nor restrictive, but I come from a Rails background where I'm used to convention over configuration, so maybe I'm biased towards reasonable defaults.

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by kevinak on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @02:22AM (#27685532)

We've been building Budibase without SK and it's great: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

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Re:Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018) by Panther34543 on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @12:39PM (#27690631)

Very cool, thanks for the link.

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