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A podcast for developers interested in building great software products. Hosted by Adam Wathan.

143: Rich Harris - Svelte and Defending the Modern Web

In this episode, Adam talks to Rich Harris about Svelte, and why we should keep pushing forward with the modern web even if it's not perfect yet.

Topics include:

  • What is Svelte and how is it different than other JS frameworks in the space?
  • What special behavior does the Svelte compiler layer on top of vanilla JS syntax and why?
  • Why the lack of render functions in Svelte isn't a real problem in practice
  • What are you giving up when you choose to build your application with something like Rails instead of JavaScript?
  • Why should we be trying to write our applications in a single language, and why should it be JS?
  • What's wrong with striving to write an application entirely in a language like Ruby instead of entirely in JS?
  • Why HEY doesn't really make a good argument against the modern web
  • Thoughts on bundle sizes, code-splitting, and why aggressive code-splitting is still better than frequent round trips to a server-rendered app
  • How Svelte and Sapper handle SSR
  • Why page transitions are the killer argument for building SPAs if we want to be able to compete with native experiences
  • Should we be thinking about JavaScript applications as native applications in terms of offline-support and eventual consistency, or should we keep thinking of them as webpages that depend on the network?

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