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Definitely still in the camp of thinking it's the next big thing. In my experience, Svelte does a great job of just getting out of the way and letting you start

Definitely still in the camp of thinking it's the next big thing. In my experience, Svelte does a great job of just getting out of the way and letting you start coding. The ecosystem isn't there yet, and I probably wouldn't try to use it in a work project. For my personal projects though, I use it for everything front-end. More than that - I've stopped making desktop apps and just default to using svelte instead. Happy to answer any specific questions you've got! Bottom line - given the opportunity, I will use Svelte.

throwaway894345 6y ago
I'm not a frontend developer, but absent svelte, the next easiest thing to develop is a full on desktop application (easier than some other frontend web framework)?
- svachalek 6y ago
  I haven't done Svelte but in general I find native is easier than web UI. The tools and libraries just did more for you 20 years ago than any web framework does today. Web frameworks (Svelte included) just keep reinventing the wheel without giving you a second one. I'm a web developer and I like the power and flexibility it has compared to native GUI development but I think a big problem is we now have an entire generation that doesn't even know what they're missing.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    That's interesting. I've done a lot of Qt and GTK development, but it was always a pretty miserable experience. Notably, GTK builds on GObject, which is just a bunch of hacks to emulate object-oriented programming in C to no discernible benefit. Similarly, Qt was (presumably still is?) its own language atop C++, and you needed a special compiler to compile it into vanilla C++. Additionally, because C and C++ build systems are so very terrible (no standard tooling, no dependency management at all, certainly no reproducibility, etc etc), managing projects in these languages was utterly terrible (nowadays I understand that CMake has built-in support for Qt, which speaks to the sadness of the build ecosystem that the build tool has to have first-class knowledge about individual libraries and frameworks). Of course, there were bindings, but bindings never adequately masked the complexity of the frameworks, and with respect to memory management you now had to understand in detail how these frameworks' memory management conventions integrated with the host language's garbage collector or you would see your Python (or whatever) application segfault. And yes, I tried Vala and Gnome's JavaScript offering and everything else available at the time. I'm guessing that the Windows and MacOS frameworks were less hostile, but it seemed like the web was surely ideal, at least in the last several years. Sure, you had to learn a web framework to build simple applications, but you could at least use a high level language with a reasonably sane package manager (for those who haven't developed in C or C++, it might come as a surprise that JavaScript and NPM are "sane" tools) and a reactive programming model. I guess I'm not sure if my expectations for web development are too high or if GTK and Qt are especially bad representatives of native development.
    - akiselev 6y ago
      > I've done a lot of Qt and GTK development, but it was always a pretty miserable experience. I echo this sentiment, with the exception of Delphi circa version 5-7, though that's probably through rose-tinted glasses since I had just come off trying to make Win32 UIs using MASM. GUI development has always been a crapshoot of learning esoteric bugs masquerading as features. Windows and MacOS UI development is no different, just more locked in. At the very least the web is somewhat consistent between platforms.
deleted 6y ago
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throwaway894345 6y ago

I'm not a frontend developer, but absent svelte, the next easiest thing to develop is a full on desktop application (easier than some other frontend web framework)?

svachalek 6y ago
I haven't done Svelte but in general I find native is easier than web UI. The tools and libraries just did more for you 20 years ago than any web framework does today. Web frameworks (Svelte included) just keep reinventing the wheel without giving you a second one. I'm a web developer and I like the power and flexibility it has compared to native GUI development but I think a big problem is we now have an entire generation that doesn't even know what they're missing.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  That's interesting. I've done a lot of Qt and GTK development, but it was always a pretty miserable experience. Notably, GTK builds on GObject, which is just a bunch of hacks to emulate object-oriented programming in C to no discernible benefit. Similarly, Qt was (presumably still is?) its own language atop C++, and you needed a special compiler to compile it into vanilla C++. Additionally, because C and C++ build systems are so very terrible (no standard tooling, no dependency management at all, certainly no reproducibility, etc etc), managing projects in these languages was utterly terrible (nowadays I understand that CMake has built-in support for Qt, which speaks to the sadness of the build ecosystem that the build tool has to have first-class knowledge about individual libraries and frameworks). Of course, there were bindings, but bindings never adequately masked the complexity of the frameworks, and with respect to memory management you now had to understand in detail how these frameworks' memory management conventions integrated with the host language's garbage collector or you would see your Python (or whatever) application segfault. And yes, I tried Vala and Gnome's JavaScript offering and everything else available at the time. I'm guessing that the Windows and MacOS frameworks were less hostile, but it seemed like the web was surely ideal, at least in the last several years. Sure, you had to learn a web framework to build simple applications, but you could at least use a high level language with a reasonably sane package manager (for those who haven't developed in C or C++, it might come as a surprise that JavaScript and NPM are "sane" tools) and a reactive programming model. I guess I'm not sure if my expectations for web development are too high or if GTK and Qt are especially bad representatives of native development.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    > I've done a lot of Qt and GTK development, but it was always a pretty miserable experience. I echo this sentiment, with the exception of Delphi circa version 5-7, though that's probably through rose-tinted glasses since I had just come off trying to make Win32 UIs using MASM. GUI development has always been a crapshoot of learning esoteric bugs masquerading as features. Windows and MacOS UI development is no different, just more locked in. At the very least the web is somewhat consistent between platforms.

deleted 6y ago

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