I had started to write a codebase in Svelte for almost a year and didn’t like the outcome of it at all.
The main reason is the lack of composability of its reactive variables. Svelte offers reactive values, reactive statements and stores. Basically if you want to create reusable reactive utilities you have to rely on stores, but it never felt natural to me to build many stores and derived stores, move state and state management outside of the components, … Mostly I ended up with very large components with lots of state and state management in the same file.
Later on I tried on SolidJS and it felt immediately much easier and natural to organize my app’s state. Just shortly after picking up Solid, I was already creating some packages for my app with utilities to help with state management. The experience was totally different; looking back I would even choose React over Svelte despite the superior performance of Svelte, as I think it just doesn’t scale well for larger apps (and I believe every app grows large or is intended to) for the reasons mentioned.
Other points I don’t like about Svelte:
- object props are considered mutable by default
- magic, implicit, nonstandard syntax
- community focused on SSR with SvelteKit
- no error boundaries Hello world • Playground • Svelte (you can’t build a serious app without this feature in my opinion)
