Svelte 5 : Complexity is bad , really bad ... so lets go back to whiteboard.

[v3ss0n]

When I heard runes changes are coming , I thought it would be cool but...
after watching the tutorial Svelte 5 is a Triumph` - i was shocked.

After 2 years of enjoying svelte as it is - building big , complex application both opensource and enterprise in svelte had never been a problem compare to other frameworks ( Angular , Emberjs , React ) . Its a breeze. It was fun , and beautiful.
We had build Mealtime Audio Streaming/ Transcription Apps. We had manage reatlime states fine in Svelte .
Coding with svelte was really fun experience , we loved it simplicity .

But Runes and changes to reactivity make me feel svelte is going the way of React and lesser complex Vue..

Only thing that pops up in my mind is Grug the brain dead developers's words.

complexity bad

say again:

complexity very bad

you say now:

complexity very, very bad

• $state(1) - it is just one function added , But $state ( value ) is 5 Tokens - that is 2-3x increased in complexity for me in my grug brain which works like LLM - compare to just let x = 1 . Harder to write , alot harder to read.
• effects why ??? onMount / onDestroy was fine... i never thought we would need it and never needed in our development lifetime.
• and $: was fine , even tho limited ...

Can we make this less complex ? In my 20 years of software engineering career , Complexity and Over-engineering are the most dangerous things to software project and it kills projects . Lets keep it simple . Its time to get back to the drawing board.

[dummdidumm]

We encourage you to give this some time and try it out yourself a little. What we found is that while it's a few more characters to write in the simple case, you quickly save many more characters in more complex scenarios because you can use Svelte's reactivity model everywhere now. We also believe that it's less complex now because $state clearly shows you "oh this is some reactive variable", compared to the implicit rules "only works at the top level" etc before. Also see this section in the FAQ for more info: https://svelte-5-preview.vercel.app/docs/faq#background-and-motivations-doesn-t-this-make-svelte-harder-to-learn . Lastly, onMount and onDestroy are not going away, you can still use them.