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Here’s how Svelte describes iteself:

Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app.

What I like

I just love how… vanilla Svelte feels. Every .svelte file is a component. You can put JavaScript in a <script> tag. You can put CSS in a <style> tag. The rest is HTML + a templating syntax similiar to JSX.

Just look at it:

<script>
  const name = 'world'
</script>

<style>
  p {
    color: red;
  }
</style>

<p>Hello {world}!</p>

Other great things:

  • Styles are scoped to components by default.
  • Often times, you set a prop with a variable that has the same name as the prop (i.e. <img src={src}>). In Svelte, you can short-hand it like this: <img {src}>. Love that.
  • Notice in those examples above, I’m not including a trailing / slash for single HTML tags like React forces you to do (you still need them for custom components).

What I’m not sure about

That’s where the “plainness” ends though. Reactivity in Svelte is… weird. For instance, to make a value or statement “reactive” you have to use this syntax:

<script>
  const foo = 1
  $: reactiveValue = foo * 2
</script>

<button on:click={() => count += 1}

Without that $:, the reactiveValue variable won’t update whenever foo changes. If you wanna make multiple statements reactive, you can wrap them like this:

$: { console.log(`the count is ${count}`); alert(`I SAID THE COUNT IS
${count}`); }

Other examples of weird (maybe not weird, but… unexpected?) syntax includes blocks within the HTML itself:

{#if user.loggedIn}
<button on:click="{toggle}">Log out</button>
{:else}
<button on:click="{toggle}">Log in</button>
{/if}

This bit from the Svelte docs makes it easier to understand:

A # character always indicates a block opening tag. A / character always indicates a block closing tag. A : character, as in {:else}, indicates a block continuation tag.

Asynchronous markup

This feature is really great:

{#await promise}
<p>...waiting</p>
{:then number}
<p>The number is {number}</p>
{:catch error}
<p style="color: red">{error.message}</p>
{/await}

Event bindings

Instead of assigning values and updating state based on events, you can just do this:

<script>
  let name = 'world'
</script>

<input bind:value="{name}" />

<h1>Hello {name}!</h1>

Which I love. React should add this.

Styles

Here’s a good write-up on some of the features Svelte has around writing styles for component: