SolidJS is a declarative UI library for building web applications, much like React, Angular, or Vue. It is built using brutally efficient fine-grai...
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I've been using this library for a big project at work and I much prefer it to React.
Although for most of the app the extra speed did not change much, It did make a big difference for screens with large tables or large graphs (drawing dependency graphs with D3). I will be using it
again for another app that I'm starting now.
So my hat goes to you @ryansolid for this wonderful library.
Thank you for a gentle introduction to the library Ryan. I have a quick question about how being fast / slow affects the end user experience, pragmatically? Is it really perceivable to end users? There has to be boundary beyond which everything will be similar for an end user.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I don't think that in general raw speed is very noticeable in typical cases on typical systems. There has been a decent amount of talk about bundle sizes and low power devices, and even there 10-20kb is only a couple hundred milliseconds. So what difference is it that say Solid renders a 5000 dom elements on a page 50ms faster than React on a Core I7. Sure it's more like 300ms on my Core I5 laptop. Realistically you are only going to notice this on initial load. And then maybe not. What's the difference between 1.4 seconds and 1.7 seconds perceptually? Almost nothing. In the Realworld Demo the gap between Solid and React Redux, the slowest library I tested, was only about 800ms on resource loading under 3G simulation and CPU throttling. Mind you TTI(Time to Interactive) differed upwards of 4 seconds.
Performance is an easy metric, only easier one is kb weight. I started working on Solid because I liked fine grained reactivity as found in libraries like KnockoutJS which had these patterns a decade ago. When I saw React basically copy it with React Hooks (and the Vue crowd finally acknowledge they had these primitives all along), I knew it was a good time to start promoting the approach as IMHO it is much better at doing very similar things by any metric. I created a library DOM Expressions to allow any reactive library(MobX, KnockoutJS, among others) benefit from my work but continued to develop Solid as the pinnacle of this approach.
So while I acknowledge leading with performance sort of cheapens it I hope that if anyone spends the time to look at Solid will see that we have a very well designed and thoughtful approach to effectively build user interfaces.
I really appreciate your work. Thank you.
It may be the best library to use if you want to make a declarative first-person shooter, where performance really matters if you want the best graphics and gameplay mechanics. :D
Svelte seems quite interested in smooth animations, I think that plays into Solid quite well too. I wonder how animations would be best written in solid and how that compares to other frameworks and their popular animation libraries.
Funny enough, I think Solid+Dart could steal some thunder from Flutter. Flutter is just gross, but, Dart is pretty nice TBH. Unfortunately there is the compiler aspect here, so it wouldn't be easy, but at some point any framework needs some answer to Native apps, in some way. NativeScript is interesting but Dart's VM is like WOW amazing. But then you inevitably see Flutter code and I just see all the horrors of Angular+OOP all over again.
I was looking at NativeScript a little. Only my JSX is compiled so it's a matter of figuring out how to best output NativeScript from it. But.. yeah I haven't dug deep at all. If people are interested I'm sure things will go there. I've been a web first guy myself mostly (although I've created and supported a React Native app). I was secretly hoping PWAs would gain more ground quickly by the time I needed to worry about this. But doesn't quite seem like it.
Animations is a place I will need to do more work. Svelte has figured out how to compile it into the template. I can do some similar stuff here but I have less explicit hooks. Svelte basically constructs a minimal lifecycle based components that it uses to anchor different stages of a components life. Solid doesn't really acknowledge components exist and relies on the scheduling of the reactive system. So far I've created solid-transition-group which basically copies React or Vue's equivalent. I've done a few other simple demos with animations but as you can imagine they work today very similar to how they'd work in React or Vue. Using state changes to drive CSS or Web Animations or what ever library you want to use. It definitely isn't as packaged in as Svelte.
Solid's may be faster but the must important thing is that the solid's Dx is much more better than that of React. Solid feels more natural than react and just fits into my head. speed is an added advantage. Solid's reactivity system is much more elegant.
How does it work with legacy apps? The beauty of vuejs is that it can work nicely with apps that have html separated and generated by the server code and also support loading dynamic html to certain extent. When we moved from angularjs 1.x, vuejs was the only option with that kind of support.
I mean Vue does make that easy so it broadcasts it as a use case but any modern library is up to the task as you can set the entry point. You can have a statically rendered site in PHP and then have React control 5 independent parts of the page by importing the bundle and calling
renderafter page load on those 5 locations. The reason I imagine we don't hear people talking about this is the build process. Vue lets you just import a script tag and start writing some components. Solid's Tagged Template literals allow you to skip the build process as well.Here's a quick codepen of Solid with no compiler running completely in the browser. codepen.io/ryansolid/pen/KKprxBN.
Although I built Solid with modern browsers in mind. So without polyfills it is not supporting Internet Explorer. Obviously it's pretty easy to make a build with that in mind it just hasn't been a priority. Certain features like proxies are not easily polyfilled so they would not work in that environment anyway.
Vue is very unique and its ability to integrate with external HTML is why I love it. No other framework provides such capability.
Yeah it's a hold out from the old days. KnockoutJS used to do that too with it's HTML string data-binding. AlpineJS and Stimulus do this sort of manipulation as well but only Vue of the modern frameworks offer both this ability and the modern built template setup. One of the benefits from still prescribing to data-binding that is completely HTML compliant.
Great work with the library! Coming from the React world it felt very easy to grab the essence. Was looking for a most performant library with Typescript, JSX and all other goodies and SolidJS hit all the bells. Will give it a try!
This looks so good. Please promote it extensively. Also some good courses on platforms like Youtube and Udemy will help.
Thanks, will try solidjs
I love a lot of things about the library. Definitely going to check it out.
I wonder how it compares to lit-html
In what aspects? There are a lot of considerations. More than I highlighted in this article. I did look for a lit-html Realworld demo when I worked on a previous article but the only one I found was Lit Element + MobX which doesn't seem representative. In a handful of micro benchmarks I've done Solid is smaller but that is inconclusive. Pure performance definitely favours Solid as highlighted in the benchmark above. I've separately done benchmarks where I've shown even out of non-compiled tagged template approaches Solid's tagged template version is faster than libraries like lit-html lighterhtml etc... https://medium.com/@ryansolid/the-fastest-way-to-render-the-dom-e3b226b15ca3?source=friends_link&sk=5ae1688dde789e46cecf5c976e708da5.
Of course there are other things that make comparison difficult as lit-html is a library designed to handle rendering and doesn't worry about components and state management so feature sets are not equivalent. Lit-html has close relationship with Polymer and supported by Google so already a huge leg up. The author also works closely with those working on standards so it is very aligned with the future of the platform. More stars on Github, larger community, and already stable 1.0 release all favourable. Definitely a good library to be looking at.