Svelte 5 came out today. Intellectually it seems cool with it’s signals based approach to reactivity. Sure, React doesn’t offer something like this. But I also can’t help but feel like these sort of optimizations aren’t necessary, or are only necessary in niche cases. You see this all of the time across frameworks. Svelte and solid are two that are buzzy this past year due to their reactivity, but I am still yet to run into a front-end task where I feel compelled to use reactivity. Most of the time, react just works, and it works great. I can’t help but feel like these framework improvements are minute and honestly not worth switch from framework to framework for.

The good: In some sense, having a myriad of frameworks is almost like free R&D for react. If some idea truly holds, it can most likely get gobbled up into react’s API.

The ideal: I wish more framework Authors were doing something like Vercel. Svelte prides itself on being a “compiled” framework, but what framework isn’t compiled these days. Even if it isn’t true compiling, it seems like every framework under the sun requires a build step. The real interesting work comes from frameworks like Next that make strong assumptions about the infra the framework will eventually be deployed to. This means it can do support things like SSR + serverless without the developer needing to care about what these things are. In my opinion this is a way bigger improvement to a framwork than something like svelte making minor optimizations to the perf of the application itself.

I’d love to see more frameworks that take the same approach and are opinionated about what infra their frameworks will eventually be deployed to. Why is vercel / next the only player in this space? In some sense, you could consider providers like upstash loosely similar. They are creating simple abstractions to use infra (task queues, cron jobs) that take the form of API and simple SDKs you can call from your code. Yet, these abstractions feel fundementally less powerful than the abstractions on next. For example, creating a function in an API folder and having that automatically deploy to a serverless function is genius level devx and is honestly a beautiful abstraction that 100% hides the infra details.

We need more frameworks that are thinking at the infra level.