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Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity

You Gotta Love Frontend · 333.8K views · 2019-04-22 · 36:45

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Overview

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

On Hacker News

The most recommended introduction to Svelte, credited with sparking its adoption.

Recommended by 15 HN people across 13 months · HN mentions 2019–2026

Topics

Web developmentCompilers, interpreters & program analysis
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sveltereactivitycompilersreactrich harrisspreadsheets

What people said

kretaceous · 2022-08 · Strong recommendation

The talk, Rethinking Reactivity by Rich Harris[0] is an amazing talk which talks about how spreadsheets were the OG reactivity software. Highly recommended. 0: [VIDEO]

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doodlesdev · 2022-07 · Strong recommendation

> Does it solve the problem of only redrawing the required minimum (beside the normal VDOM approach)? Yes, in fact I think it's actually pretty hard _not_ to redraw the bare minimum LOL. If you want to know more about Svelte (even if you're not looking to develop with it) I HIGHLY recommend listening to this presentation called "Rethinking reactivity" by Rich Harris (the creator) [VIDEO] > But does it solve the problem of growing state which never gets GC'd when components which used to use it are gone? I think the answer to the question is yes. Although the problem I'm speaking mostly about state management is the source of truth problem. Svelte provides a global store to store data, and data stored on local components are just _variables_ (no useState or hooks or anything complicated) where the Svelte compiler handles everything. Something else I'm really eyeing right now is SolidJS which takes a very similar approach to Svelte (compiler instead of library) for frontend development but provides an API that's very familiar to React developers so there's not much of a learning curve (although Svelte has a very easy learning curve too).

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gregors · 2020-03 · Strong recommendation

Highly recommend this talk [VIDEO] Rich Harris is an excellent speaker and it's worth seeing how Svelte approaches some things

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