Rich Harris on frameworks, the web, and the edge

so uh I'm gonna be giving a talk tonight called uh in my humble opinion uh and it's a collection of loosely connected thoughts about recent trends in front-end development there's a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff happening in the front end world at the moment and this is a good time as I need to take stock of it so I'm going to be sharing some opinions of varying levels of spiciness and I'm going to talk about how those shape the design as well and spoke I'm not here to try and convince

you anything you probably find lots to disagree with me about but hopefully this will give you some insight into how we think about our role as tool makers now it takes a certain lack of humility to stand in front of a room of people and talk for half an hour if my words mean something but having said that I am very aware that some of the ideas I'll be talking tonight talking about tonight have come from the brains of far smarter and more accomplished people than me so take everything that I say with

a grain of salt these are humble opinions and finally while I think that the Svelte team would broadly agree with things I'm going to say tonight I'm not claiming to speak for them I'm also not speaking for the cell which is a healthfully pluralistic company even if we all dressed the same these are my humble opinions I'm going to start with a fairly non-spicy opinion there's too much thought leadership

that would have you believe that JavaScript frameworks are the root of all that is wrong with the web and if only people would make better technology choices the web would be perfect the only problem with it is it is absolute horseshit when you last went on a recipe website and had to fight through a gauntlet of ads and newsletter modals and cookie consent banners and the recipe authors story about her childhood memories of art barrels butter pecan cookies and are you left thinking Matt if only they had used a different abstraction for creating Dom elements no you don't the web doesn't suck because of JavaScript

frameworks it sucks because of capitalism it sucks because of the attention economy because we pay for everything with data and because we're all slaves to the algorithm on some level we all know this and so I've come to believe that as framework authors the most impactful thing we can do isn't fixating on a kilobyte here or a millisecond there it's empowering developers through education and documentation and diagnostics and sensible

defaults to do the right thing in the face of structural forces that bend the web towards sucking it the other stuff matters but probably less than we think because every now and then someone will show some data that proves some frameworks deliver better experiences than others this is a chart that shows how the main JavaScript centric application frameworks score on Core Web Vitals measurements you can see that only Astro and SvelteKit outperform the average website but we have to be careful how we interpret this for example Astro explicitly

markets itself as being designed for content sites that don't require much interactivity and so it has a natural advantage over frameworks that are typically used for more demanding workloads all of which is to say that as much as we love to talk about technology choices for the most part you shouldn't feel pressured by me or anybody else to switch away from whatever makes you productive at shipping software next take something I've seen more and more of lately is people talking about zero kilobytes

of Java as in this framework ships zero kilobytes of JavaScript by default the implication is that JavaScript is inherently bad and so a framework that doesn't serve JavaScript is inherently good but zero kilobytes of JavaScript is not a goal the goal is to meet some user need or if you're cynical to meet some business need by way of meeting some user need and sometimes performance is a factor in how effectively you can meet that need we've all seen the studies showing that for every millisecond uh delay Amazon loses a billion dollars or