svelte

Zola is wonderful. It builds quickly, it's extremely configurable, but it is (by design) not well suited for interactive elements or complex JavaScript. I hadn't thought I wanted that until I saw some on Amos's site. He ended up using iframes to manage that integration, which is a perfectly acceptable solution. But it did make me wonder: can we accomplish the same result without all of that nasty ugly HTML? Can we just write some clean JS and call it a day?

Let's find out…

Backstory

I have a groups of friends from college that have a Secret Santa event every year. Even after we all moved apart we've kept it up, jumping to Zoom to unwrap our gifts and guess who was our gifter. One of my most favorite traditions, a delight tempered only by the daunting task of logistics. You see, there are some constraints

Confession Time

My performance testing methodology so far has been extremely flawed. It serves mostly as an indicator for how rigorous performance testing might go when I eventually get around to it. Which I think is reasonable, but it doesn't have to be quite so unfair to Svelte. Svelte is doing quite a lot more than Lithe, so I really shouldn't be comparing them side by side. It'd be good to re-run some earlier tests, but with the JavaScript equivalent of what Lithe is doing. Which, let's be honest, is mostly just parsing the HTML into an AST.…

The Motivation

Svelte is like Rust for me in that I had heard good things for years before I even gave it a try.

Svelte is like Rust for me in that I loved it immediately.

It's really very simple to write in, the basic idea is engaging, and after trying it I wanted so badly for it to succeed. For context I have professional experience with vanilla JavaScript, React, and Angular. After transitioning a small app from Angular to Svelte, here were my takeaways…