And I shouldn't have made it about that. As I get older I the more I just get tired of extra things. There's always a price when you add more things. Svelte technically does add things, but I think it has better bang for its buck. The fact it doesn't pointlessly impose OOP constructs upon the end-developer is a big win for me.
This is the standard narrative when OSS contributors got hired but ok, I'd write the same.
But then just tell us what was the motivation of Vercel's shareholders and CEO to acquire Rich for such a high price (he is the compensation and ESOP you pay absolutely worth) but what's your gain? "Just supporting Rich and helping the project grow" or just buying him out of the market?
On a high level: if Svelte succeeds, the Web succeeds and Vercel succeeds.
More concretely: we want Rich to help shape Vercel's support for frameworks as an open platform. We want to hear how, as a framework creator, the platform can best serve him. We project this work will have ripple effects like making Astro or Remix better on Vercel, or the next framework you invent. You'll hear about this work soon.
We want to hear what edge infrastructure would make Svelte the fastest for developers and visitors. We want to also help him build a better Svelte by connecting him with customers who are betting on it in production. We want to learn from his DX expertise so that we can make better products.
We are very excited about this and we think betting on Open Source for the SDK together with an Open Platform for infrastructure is the only way to succeed in our space.
Why is this 'awesome news' for us devs, the market and competition if one vendor now controls all modern SSR frameworks plus significant parts of the tool chain (swc)?
Does Vercel actually “control” Svelte, though? The existing governance structure is untouched, they’re just paying the salary of the lead (and definitely not only) developer.
Not sure if this topic is worth our time to debate. There are millions of ways of subtly controlling/influencing entities. And it's much easier if you pay money, ESOP and pay even more money if future goals and exits come alive.
The Zope Corporation hired Guido van Rossum to work on Zope for three years (a Python web application server and content management system), then he moved on. That didn't destroy Guido, or Zope, or Python.
>He has worked for various research institutes, including the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). From 2000 until 2003 he worked for Zope Corporation. In 2003 Van Rossum left Zope for Elemental Security. While there he worked on a custom programming language for the organization. From 2005 to December 2012, he worked at Google, where he spent half of his time developing the Python language. In January 2013, he started working for Dropbox. In October 2019, Van Rossum officially retired before coming out of retirement the following year to join Microsoft.
Guido and Rich are both uncontrollable forces of nature!
Even if Vercel came out and said “we’ve bought Rich Harris’s voice, every choice will be controlled by us” (which they haven’t!) they still wouldn’t control the project because Rich isn’t a BDFL.
If we have such trustworthy markets and competition, then how the hell did we end up with React and Angular, huh?
Ayn Rand sucks at software design, as much as she sucks at philosophy and economics and social design and writing. Your trust in her is certainly misplaced.
Anyway, why do you have such a huge problem with Rich acting in his own best self interest, that you found a need to personally attack him so viciously and often as you did in this discussion for all that he's done for himself and the Svelte community?
Don't you believe the invisible hand of the market, which you trust so much, will prosecute your vengeance on Rich, who you find so untrustworthy?
Calling someone weak is a personal attack. You are not Rich. Don’t speak for him or his attributes. Keep the discussion constructive, you’ve already been asked in this post to calm down the personal attacks even after Rich gave you a kind reply
Next just bought its biggest upcoming competitor—SvelteKit. Next is the best that React has to offer but it still has flaws. Svelte and SvelteKit are so awesome you cannot believe it before you've built something bigger and so much ahead of the entire React ecosystem.
We migrated a huge/complex React app in a month and the difference is night and day (performance/bundle size/dev productivity). React was great but it's time to move on.
I'm disappointed by Rich. Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)—he just cashed out (sky-high compensation and ESOP). Not a rant and to give you some background, one major reason we went with SvelteKit was not to rely on the Next team. And now, I am again with them...
Now we have a monopoly of rare, modern SSR frameworks.
I understand this perspective! But as anyone who knows me will tell you, I would be the worst person in the world to try and build a business around Svelte. As others have said, the expectations from investors would make it far less likely that Svelte could remain a community-centric project.
It's important to clarify that Vercel (which has earned its open source bona fides) hasn't 'bought' Svelte or SvelteKit. It's more accurate to say that they're supporting Svelte's development by paying for a full time engineer to work on it. There's a healthy core team of developers who certainly won't relinquish _their_ independence because of _my_ career choices.
It's fair to be sceptical about all this! But I've had multiple conversations throughout this process where the importance of maintaining independence was expressed by both sides, and I truly believe this is the best outcome for Svelte and its community.
Congrats on the job, Rich! I've been using Svelte, Typescript & Babel in the past couple of months to build a set of TV apps targeting some fairly slow and ancient devices and it's been brilliant. Totally impossible to do that with React, I do know some people who tried it though.
We're all lucky that you got a polite, substantive reply, but please don't cross into personal attack like this in HN comments. It generally causes discussion quality to tank drastically.
@dang, second reply and apologies, now I know what you mean, I edited some part away which you probably meant and which is still in quotes of others' comments. Sorry, I'll try to improve and thanks for the hint!
Can't follow you, what do you mean/where did I cross into personal attacks? I highly appreciate Rich but the elephant in the room had to be addressed, especially on HN.
I wonder that I am the only one that questions his move and that you also approach me instead of welcoming a healthy debate. Whatever, I guess you just do your job.
Btw, when does HN get proper pagination and a darkmode?
Do I get shadowbanned now for asking too many questions?
> I'm disappointed by Rich. Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)—he just cashed out
That includes a lot of assumptions and is unduly personal. I realize you're coming from a place of being a fan, but still, there's an ordinary human being on the receiving end of such comments.
> Instead of thinking bigger, raising money (it would have been so easy, Rich, instead of doing proud conference talk after talk why didn't you talk to a VC??)
In no world would taking VC funding have been easier. They’d want cash returns and hockey stick growth, and soon. So instead of focusing on making the framework as good as it could be, Rich’s attention would be diverted.
When SvelteKit becomes a framework impossible to run on anything that isn’t a Vercel platform, then maybe I’ll be outraged. Until then, subjecting an incredibly talented developer to the day-to-day whims of VCs seems like just about the worst outcome for everyone.
I don’t normally mean to sound uncharitable but your original comment is pretty uncharitable to Rich, so: if you want a stable platform that will live for many years to come, the absolute last thing you want is for it to take VC investment. That you don’t see this speaks volumes to your understanding of how any of this works.
interesting that you think talking to a VC and starting a startup (where he would be spending >50% time on business things and be forced to come up with a monetization plan) is better for svelte than getting fulltime sponsorship to solely work on Svelte and working with the top tier talent at Vercel.
Svelte and Vue got started when someone just went and did it. If you think it's so important to have many competitors in this space, just go and do it :)
No desire to be acquired (open to investment but that's it), just build a business around accompanying features/services.
Goal is fast, simple, and friendly regardless of your skillset. No lock-in as the entire thing is a thin abstraction over Node.js/Express.js and components are built using plain HTML, CSS, and JS (no special languages or syntax). Also adding in a lot of helper stuff so you're not stuck cobbling together random packages for common stuff (i18n, form validation, etc).
Feel free to email me if you or your team have questions: [email protected].
Edit: your account has unfortunately been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments. Worse, we've had to ask you many times not to break the site guidelines. I don't want to ban you, so could you please review the rules and fix this?
We're really trying for a different sort of internet forum here, and we need everyone to pull in the same direction to have a chance of that working in the long run. The default is deterioration, followed by scorched earth, followed by heat death. We're trying to stave that off here, at least for a while longer: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Agreed. It took me half a day and I came not remotely to the UX and performance of coc.vim. Most incl. the nvim team are not aware that eg. tsserver is the fastest and most responsive code formatter for TS (yes, it goes beyond the LSP spec but that's how it is, also for historical reasons). Prettier does not come close.
Maybe they've never tried or deliberately ignore coc.vim for whatever reason. coc.vim works almost out of the box, has the fastest and most pragmatic maintainer who helps anyone and tsserver makes it as good and as fast as VS Code. Instead of just cloning coc.vim's tsserver implementation—or why do they no contribute to coc.vim??—roll their own inferior solution, years later. It's not that nvim's LSP implementation is at its beginning and we can expect more is coming, no the maintainers just do not know or ignore the status quo. Feels very much like Bram a decade ago.
Hi, I'm a maintainer. I think this is a huge mischaracterization of the team. We definitely are aware (and inform users) the current state using the theia wrapper lags coc.nvim and vscode. We've never said anything disparaging about coc.nvim, and the built-in client is still seeing rapid development.
On a different note, we have made upstream requests to MS, worked with language server authors, and generally try to contribute positively to the language server ecosystem. Neovim users will always be free to use coc.
If you have actionable items for improving the client, please reach out on our discourse or on our matrix channel. Thanks!
So many memories. From a time far away. Before I got my first Macbook. When computer were honest. When the underlying OS was ugly and nobody cared if apps used their own style.
