Ok, I see your point. I wrote in another thread that I loved the simplicity of using $: for deriveds and effects in Svelte 3 and 4. And yes, the conciseness and magic were definitely part of it. You could just move so fast with it. Getting better performance with the new reactivity system is important to my data viz work, so it helped me to accept the other changes in Svelte 5.
Exactly. There was a certain simplicity that might be lost. But yeah I can imagine it might work out differently for others as well. Glad to hear it is for you!
Have you considered other options? Curious if you came across anything particularly interesting from the simplicity or DX angle.
I just saw Nue and Datastar suggested somewhere, but have not had time to check them out yet, but I will probably stick with Svelte, need to get stuff built.
One thing that also came to mind regarding Svelte 5 is that I always use untrack() for $effect() and declare dependencies explicitly, otherwise Svelte 5 becomes too magical for me.
Yeah those are pretty cool and on my radar! And thanks for sharing the tip :)
Just checked your work on covary and it's pretty rad! What's your backend like?
Thanks! covary is my first Svelte 5 project (have not yet migrated my Svelte 4 projects). The backend is surprisingly simple, but I'm relatively familiar with the data and statistics, so maybe that's why it's so simple and/or perceived as such by me. I really like working on the human interface layer, i.e. the frontend. Backend work for me is always in the service of that.
If you find a viable alternative to Svelte and React, please let me know.