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Svelte 5 is not JavaScript

Svelte 5 as a case study in how abstractions aimed at simplifying concepts can actually make software development more complex.

There were many ancillary techniques involved in improving performance, but having a framework compile step gave the Svelte team a lot of leeway for rearranging things under the hood without making developers learn new concepts. Svelte's compiler avoided some of the pitfalls associated with virtual DOM diffing solutions, but evidently there was still enough of a performance gain to be had to justify the introduction of proxies. This is only one example, but it seems clear to me that any prop that is closed over by a callback function that lives longer than its component will be undefined when I want to use it — with no reassignment existing in lexical scope.

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