Rich Harris on why he created Svelte

I took a job working at a financial  publication in London. And this was about the time of the 2008 financial crash.  And I distinctly remember just a few months after I started working - it was my first  job - a bunch of people got laid off because the economy was crashing. I thought it was  going to be a last-in-first-out situation. And I was on the chopping block, but they weren't  paying me enough for it to be worth their time to fire me. So I survived. But the lesson that I  took from that was, you know, if I'm going to

make it in this industry, I need to become more  employable. And so I started drifting towards more technical roles. And a couple of years after that,  after spending some time working on video stuff, they needed someone to do some  basic HTML angling, essentially. And I was kind of in the right place at the  right time. So I started playing with code again. And at that point I was seeing the kind  of work that was happening at places like the

BBC and The Guardian and The New York Times,  where they were using code, generally Flash, but also increasingly JavaScript, to produce  these interactive journalistic experiences. And they were doing stuff with data that I  thought was very relevant to the work that we were doing at this financial publishers.  And so I got very inspired by the work that I was seeing happen at those places. And I  was like I want to do that. And so I started trying to teach myself JavaScript with the  help of the development team at the company.

When I started doing visual journalism, the tooling available to programmers wasn't  as good as it is today. There just wasn't as much stuff. And it was hard, it was really hard  to write these rich interactive applications. And so with, you know, all of the  naivety of youth, I thought I can solve this. And so I started working on  a framework of my own called Ractive, which was kind of inspired by a mash-up  of Knockout and Angular and some of the

other things that were around at  the time. And it was pretty good. Like I was very fond of it. It had some success,  you know, was used by a few different companies and introduced a lot of the ideas that are  nowadays kind of table stakes in frameworks like single file components and stuff like that. But  ultimately it just wasn't good enough to compete with some of the bigger frameworks. And so after  a few years, I became of the view that Ractive, like many of the frameworks from that era, weren't  really well suited to the era of the mobile web.

A lot of these things had been built  with the desktop web as the kind of environment in which they were  designed and expected to run. But the mobile web was becoming more and  more a part of people's daily experience. And the reality was that we were shipping  too much JavaScript and we were doing too much work and we needed to kind of reset our  expectations around what frameworks look like. So in a way, Svelte began as an act of atonement  for my sins. You can kind of trace its origins

back to Brooklyn JS, which was a monthly meetup  that used to happen in Brooklyn just around the corner from here. And this was a place where  JavaScript programmers in the area would come together and they would share lightning talks  and talk about things they're working on. And one of those evenings I was talking  to one of the people who ran Brooklyn JS,

and he was talking about an idea that he had  that would turn the code that you'd written into something else. He was talking about  compilers. And I didn't really understand what all that meant at the time, but the  idea kind of lodged itself in my brain. And so these two things came together, my own  sense of responsibility for having built a framework that had too much JavaScript and did  too much work. And this idea that you could use compilers to do a better job of delivering  a really good user experience. And that came