What Is Svelte?

Writing Svelte feels like writing regular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Svelte is a JavaScript framework created by Rich Harris that aims to solve the problem of abundance of JavaScript on the web while delivering a delightful developer and user experience.

Svelte is compiled meaning it’s more of a language than a traditional JavaScript framework so it’s not constrained by limitations of JavaScript. Because of that it can deliver the best developer experience and ship less code because the framework melts away when you ship code and you’re only left with generated JavaScript. That’s a couple of kilobytes compared to something like React that has to ship the entire runtime or library to work.

Svelte doesn’t have to concern itself with the bundle size of the framework so it can have features such as animations built-in because only what you use gets bundled.

Svelte is comparable to React and Vue for building single page applications where your entire application lives inside one element but if you want a framework with more opinions how to write applications with routing and server-side rendering there’s SvelteKit that’s comparable to Remix and Next.js for React or Nuxt.js for Vue.