Hacker News Reader

I don't see how it can hurt adoption? Svelte/Sveltekit are already stable. This is simply an update from the Svelte team about how performance is getting even better. If anything, this inspires confidence from me about how the team is constantly looking to improve the product. Svelte 3 to Svelte 4 was pretty much a painless transition too.

A lot of panic in here about how people think this is a Angular v1 to v2 transition all over again. Svelte version updates are largely behind the scenes so there's really not much to upgrade if your app is already built in Sveltekit.

People who haven't tried Svelte/Sveltekit yet are seriously missing out. It's a breath of fresh air in today's UI landscape. The constant performance gains are the cherry on top.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Osborne_effect&ol...>

Svelte doesn't exist in a vacuum, and developers have been burned by major version bumps over and over again (Angular, every PHP upgrade, Python 3, etc). If Svelte is stable, they can signal that by keeping the version numbers stable.

People who are still considering adoption don't know enough yet to read release notes and understand what are breaking changes and what are not.

If you introduce a breaking change no matter how trivial or edge case it's considered WITHOUT bumping the major version number, I guarantee folks will be very bitter indeed.

Trust is hard-earned but easily lost. Best not to use a semver number blithely as a marketing tool.

Backward compatibility is best, but if you have to break things, make it 100% clear to folks downstream. This is what Svelte 4 did. The changes were mostly esoteric and changed a couple of defaults due to experience/lessons learned, but they were breaking changes made for good reasons. Leave semver considerations out of the marketing and concentrate on the problems you're trying to solve and how well the tool helps solve them for you.

I don't want to dismiss Svelete entierly but this code `<button on:click={handleClick}>` smells like old bad ideas instead of fresh air.

It is yet another custom templating language with its unique limits [0].

If I have an option i'll stick with JSX.

[0] https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/5112#

> If I have an option i'll stick with JSX.

"I don't like the way the garnish looks they put on my ribeye, so I'm just gonna head over to McDonalds."

JSX doesn't even parse the same as HTML5; it matches XHTML from decades ago. Again, the source doesn't match what the target uses (browsers). It's close, but not the same.

A Big Mac is close to a good burger, but it's not a good burger.

Node.js is now on version 20, and Node 16 was stil active as of this time last year. Is it unstable?

literally spending 2 seconds reading the Svelte 4 release makes it clear that its a maintenance release. you could've done that instead of typing all this.

The Node foundation puts out maintenance cycles on their site:

https://nodejs.dev/en/about/releases/

v16 had maintenance + development for 2+ years. Seems pretty good for an ecosystem that has a reputation of breaking changes across minor npm packages.

I use svelte for some side projects, I want to adopt it where I've worked in the past but it's very hard to win mindshare against arguments about stability and support. And honestly? Those arguments are very valid, that's why I asked if these types of hype posts actually hurt adoption. It was a question, this is a forum.

---

As an aside I'm very disappointed with your reply attacking my education level.

You don't remember me but I met you at React Boston 2018 and complimented your talk. If this is how you talk to people online that are nobodies, I don't know what to say... except thanks for showing me your true colors.

Hopefully you're just having a moment of stinginess and this isn't who you actually are.

thanks for remembering me, and no i didnt attack your education level, i was just very tired of people having lazy superficial reactions to version changes and making up a non-story. i shouldve also pointed out that the active version of React went from React 16->17->18 in the span of 2 years without people raising this kind of comment so its basically a double standard. anyway i see where you're coming from so I apologize.

I understand, thank you for the apology.

I wasn't trying to diss Svelte at all with my comment, my question is very sincere. I use Svelte for a few local apps on my home network (board game and a music playlist selectors) but I have a very hard time convincing people starting new projects to consider it. That's why I tried to pose it as a question because I don't really know how to argue against it.

Svelte 3 was released 4 years ago. Svelte 4 had VERY few breaking changes, and those were in obscure corner cases.

Four years in the JavaScript ecosystem denotes a very stable API. 99.9% of all Svelte 3 projects would likely need no code changes at all moving to v4, at least that's been my experience.

Enterprises love Angular… which is now on version 16. Speaking from personal experience, the level of breakage between Angular versions (specifically v13 to something newer) is far greater than what was found in Svelte 3-to-4.

Svelte is substantially similar to plain HTML, CSS, and JS than any other framework out there except for htmx, and htmx gets there by actively avoiding any JS (punting to AlpineJS, which will have its own major version change issues) and therefore limiting the scope of problems htmx can tackle on its own.

htmx is great for what it is, and I love that it is helping people understand the inherent power of HTML before JS even joins the chat. However, it's not a complete web development solution like Svelte (or React, Angular, Vue, Solid, etc.).

Svelte 4 was just a maintenance release (also after a couple of years of Svelte 3) to smooth-out the way to Svelte 5.

But why did Svelte 4's maintenance changes need to be a major version bump? Why not make the changes as minor version changes to Svelte 3, then bundle all breaking changes into Svelte 4?

Because major version bumps are 'sexy' nowadays.

Have you seen the insane abuse that the Chrome (and later, Firefox) teams have subjected their version numbers to?

In the first ten years Firefox existed, it went from version 0.1 to version 5. They're completely meaningless concepts now. It is ludicrous we are now on major version >100 for both browsers!

Do Major version bump contributions count more towards promotions at those companies?

IDK about promotions but apparently it was a thing for the TypeScript project to get funding at Microsoft:

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14116#issueco...

There is a major difference: user-facing applications don't need to maintain backward compatibility.

For a library or a language, developers like to use Semantic Versioning: a major update will break client code.

> There is a major difference: user-facing applications don't need to maintain backward compatibility.

Of course they do. Users still use extensions and web-pages that they expect to work. Firefox moving from e.g. XUL/XPCOM to WebExtensions could've been a major version bump, for example. Ditto Manifest v3 for Chrome.

I wish people would stop assuming users are too stupid to understand basic information about the software they use!

I feel that when an application stops supporting some old, unused file format that nobody cares about anymore (for example some old version of .doc files), then it should not be a major version bump. That would be giving too much visibility to a change that has little to no impact for most users.

Extension APIs on the other hand should have their own version number. Especially since an application may ship with both v1.x and v2.x for some time while v1 is being phased out. The app may even display some warning: "you are using extensions X, Y and Z that are using the API v1. This API will be removed in next release, causing these extensions not to work anymore".

The target audience of those version numbers is different from the app's main version number.

Thunderbird is on 115

it simplifies versioning. there is no more major and minor versions. there is just version. how is firefox 108 any different from 10.8? it just feeds the argument when to make a major version bump if you don't just do it when you reach the 9.

it's something the linux kernel could have adopted too. because the difference between 5.19 and 6.0 is just as incremental as all the other versions.

the only benefit with the kernel versioning is that the first number gives you a rough indicator how old a system is. are you still on 4.x? you should probably upgrade. but actually the same can be done with current browser versions. your browser version is in the 80s? you should probably upgrade.

in the kernel case it would have been interesting to increase the major version exactly every 5 years to help with the age estimate.

as it is, the kernel settled on the version number being base 20

> it simplifies versioning. there is no more major and minor versions. there is just version.

Yep. For developers that build software its very easy. Fixed a bug - version++, improved performance - version++, changed API - yes version++, rewrite program in another language, broke all compatibility, remove 2/3 of all supported features, yep, version++.

By your logic difference between bugfix in programming language and change of syntax should be indicated with the same version++?

no, i only don't see the need to distinguish between major and minor feature releases.

there are feature releases and bugfix releases. this is what the linux kernel, browsers and even some linux distributions are doing.

for most apps but also for the linux kernel and for programming languages incompatible changes should not even happen. a browser should support old websites, so there is never an excuse to break compatibility. hence no need for versioning that. i am not talking about libraries and interfaces.

the main problem with major.minor versions is that it is never clear what should be a major version change and what should not. emacs solved the problem by simply dropping the major version. a few other applications did too.

the pike programming language switched from 0.6 to 7, avoiding calling it 1.0 as the language had already been stable for some time by then. then they slowly increased the minor version to 7.8 in 2008, but where afraid to go to 8.0. i remarked that if they didn't switch to 8 soon, they never would. eventually they switched to 8.0, 5 years later, and are now at 8.0.1738. (but there is a 9.0.0 version in the development branch since end of last year).

sbcl switched from 1.5.9 to 2.0.0 without any major changes. since then they release a new version every month and the version number is basically decade.year.month. there is no distinction between major and minor versions. the current version (looking at the calendar) should be 2.3.7. what does that tell me about the difference to 2.2.11? absolutely nothing. if they used a single linear increasing version it would not make a difference.

which in my eyes is actually correct for both examples because a programming language should not have major changes. the python2->3 transition was a big headache. it should not have been necessary.

in most examples that i can find the distinction between major and minor is meaningless. a more sensible distinction is: feature.bugfix, that's enough. and for many apps i would not even bother with bugfix releases unless the bugs are damaging to the users.

Because of a little thing called semantic versioning. A change can be 'minor' in the sense that it doesn't really affect how the vast majority of users use your package, but still have changes that are technically breaking.

Exactly. A library update that requires 1 minute of code writing to fix breaking changes is still a breaking change.

I'm aware of that. I'm asking why the tiny breaking changes couldn't just wait for the next major release, because OP is correct that frequent version number bumps scare off potential adopters.

Used carefully, semantic versioning shouldn't just describe the development choices you made, it should encourage you to make more conservative choices to avoid unnecessary breaking changes, small or large.

Svelte 4 was a complete structural overhaul of the `sveltejs/svelte` repo — turning it into a monorepo, converting all the `.ts` modules into typechecked `.js` files, etc, modernising our dependencies and our workflows, dropping CJS and so on.

Svelte 5 is a complete internal rewrite of the code itself.

Could we have achieved both in a single release? With perfect planning and foresight (at a time when we didn't yet know what Svelte 5 would entail) then maybe, yes. But more likely, it would have just jeopardised both things, and made it near-impossible to ship bugfixes for the current stable version. That's why we opted for this approach, and carefully communicated it (through our own dev vlog, our release notes, our blog posts, our podcast appearances and so on).

Managing an open source project beyond a certain level of complexity and usage is _hard_. These are the sorts of choices that are sometimes necessary. I'm very confident that we made the right one.

That makes a lot of sense.

FWIW, I didn't intend either of my comments to be a personal attack. I understand how complicated running an open source project as large as yours can be, and I don't envy your task. I was just agreeing with the original poster about how these things look to those outside the community. Your explanation for how that happened makes a lot of sense.

<3

Similar approach seems to have worked well for Java. There are long term releases like versions 8,11,17 and everything in between are kind of catch up releases with short term support cycle. Enterprises typically adopt LTS releases while enthusiasts/startups/developers would tinker with other short-term releases and give valuable feedback back to the community.

I've got a side project still on Svelte 3, I feel this. I got the implementation into a good state a few months ago and haven't needed to touch it, soon it will be two major versions behind. No regrets, no other framework was as easy to work with for a primarily SSR app.

I was feeling this with Quarkus too, but they finally set one of their recent versions as LTS. Setting an LTS and migration guides between LTSs is a practice I'd like to see more in front-end tech.

If I may, you are a major behind, and not much has changed from 3. 4 to 5 seems that will be more "radical" but right now is still in development

There's about a 99% chance you can update from Svelte 3 to 4 without any code changes. Some code changes are performed automatically by the migration script: https://svelte.dev/docs/v4-migration-guide

Yeah I have a little personal Svelte app from the v3 days too, basically a simple form site that I use to choose boardgames during dinner parties.

It still works locally, been meaning to update it which I think will be painless as well because it's a dead simple site. No regrets either, I really like Svelte and tried to convert some data visualization apps with it but couldn't win mindshare at the time in these companies.

I haven't look into too much, but what made react easy to adopt was that Facebook would put out codemods to help migration during major transitions. It was easy to justify these version bumps when there was tooling that made these transitions somewhat painless.

Yeah, I’d agree that React development has been a major disappointment starting with hooks. I’d like to move on, but to what? I want a framework that fulfills the promise of React: efficient DOM updates derived from state paired with something that is just JS under the hood - no templating language/DSL.

Isn't that just SolidJS?