Re:Solid.js feels like what I always wanted React to be
by orenelbaum on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @03:45AM
(#30511354)
Solid has done some branding around performance but the promotion is shifting to be more balanced, as Solid really isn't about performance. Solid's biggest priority has been to give the best DX for building performant applications that stay maintainable at scale and after years of work on the same project. Solid might seem harder than Svelte or Vue to get started with (although this is arguable IMO) but due to it's simplicity I think that it's much easier to master and understand what actually is going on.
Compare this to Svelte which has the goal of creating the perfect high level abstraction so that you never need to understand how things work and was originally created for smaller one off projects with much smaller complexity and no maintenance burden.
The chicken-and-egg ecosystem problem for new frameworks is tough. I've been working on Svelte stuff lately which has a similar problem but less extreme--the ecosystem is still much worse than React's, unsurprisingly, but it's also much better than Solid's right now.
I think Solid's primary branding is around performance and Svelte's primary branding is around it being easy. For getting things off the ground, I think "easy" is a much more successful approach.