In today's ever-evolving front-end landscape, React has been the crown jewel for many developers, including me. Its component-based structure, the efficiency of the Virtual DOM, and the vast community support made it a clear favorite.

Another thing called Svelte reached my ears. So I jumped into messing around with it and here is what I found:

1. Why Svelte?

Before diving into the transition, it's important to understand why one might consider moving. Svelte brings:

Simplicity: No Virtual DOM, less boilerplate, and straightforward syntax.

Performance: Svelte compiles components to vanilla JavaScript at build time, making it incredibly fast.

Reactivity: Reactive statements make data binding a breeze.

2. Initial Steps

The first thing I did was set up a Svelte project using Svelte's official template. Then, I spent some quality time with the official Svelte tutorial, which provides hands-on experience with the framework's core concepts.

3. Translating Components

Moving components from React to Svelte involved understanding the subtle differences:

JSX vs Svelte's Template Language: Instead of JSX, Svelte uses its HTML-like syntax, which made templates much more readable.

State Management: In Svelte, mutable state is handled with simple variables, and reactivity is achieved with a mere $: before a statement.

4. Event Handling

While React uses synthetic events, Svelte employs native event listeners. Transitioning meant:

Replacing onClick with on:click.

Eliminating event.persist() since Svelte uses native events.

5. Lifecycle Methods

React's lifecycle methods such as componentDidMount or componentWillUnmount got translated to Svelte's onMount and beforeDestroy.

6. Styling

Moving from CSS-in-JS (or any other React styling paradigm) to Svelte's scoped styles was refreshing. Each Svelte component gets its own encapsulated style, reducing the fear of global styles interfering with component-specific designs.

7. State Management on Steroids

While React has Context or Redux or Zustand for global state management, Svelte offers stores. These writable and readable stores made state management straightforward and less verbose.

8. Integrations & Plugins

Transitioning also meant looking for equivalent Svelte plugins and integrations or creating custom solutions when needed. Luckily, the Svelte community is robust and growing, offering ample resources.

9. Community and Support

I won't lie; the React community is vast. But the Svelte community, although smaller, is enthusiastic and rapidly expanding. Platforms like Discord, Reddit, and Stack Overflow provided ample support during my transition.

10. Conclusion

The journey from React to Svelte was awesome. While both have their strengths and use cases, Svelte's simplicity, speed, and clean syntax it's all I wanted.

All my new projects this year were built with Svelte. Here is my last one (a solo adventure):

https://salarioo.com - a job board with salaries only. 🚀

On another project (full blown e-commerce) I encouraged my team of experienced React developers to try it out and they loved it and yes we have almost finished it using Svelte.

That said I doubt I will go back to React. ⚰️

In another words Svelte ruined React for me just as The Expanse ruined every other space science fiction.

🔥

🔥

Have you tried Svelte yet?

Share your experiences and thoughts below and thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post and want to stay updated, follow me on Twitter for the latest updates and check out my projects on GitHub.

May the code be with you!