SvelteUI 1.0: A Complete Rewrite for Svelte 5

[Brisklemonade]

Dear SvelteUI users,

We're thrilled to announce that we're undertaking a complete rewrite of the SvelteUI library to take full advantage of the new features and improvements coming in Svelte 5 (in addition to the deprecation of our core styling engine). This decision wasn't taken lightly, but we believe it's necessary to ensure SvelteUI remains a robust, high-performance, and future-proof solution for building modern Svelte applications.

Why a Rewrite?

Svelte 5 introduces significant changes to the framework's architecture and API, some of which address long-standing issues and limitations that SvelteUI has faced. By rewriting the library from the ground up, we can:

• Leverage the performance improvements and optimizations in Svelte 5, resulting in even faster rendering and better overall application performance.
• Restructure the codebase to align with Svelte's reactive principles and best practices, improving code organization, readability, and maintainability.
• Simplify the library's internals, making it easier to understand, extend, and maintain in the long run, ensuring a more sustainable future for SvelteUI.
• Provide a more idiomatic and "Svelte-like" API, seamlessly integrating with Svelte's design principles and enhancing the overall developer experience (DX).
• Optimize the library's bundle size and tree-shaking capabilities, resulting in smaller application payloads, faster load, and build times.

What This Means for Users

During the rewrite process, the current beta version of SvelteUI (0.15.3) will continue to be maintained and supported. However, new features and enhancements will be focused on the upcoming 1.0.0 release.

We understand that a major version upgrade can be disruptive, but we're committed to making the transition as smooth as possible. As part of the 1.0.0 release, we'll provide comprehensive migration guides and documentation, as well as full support in the discord community

Timeline and Next Steps

We're currently in the alpha phase of SvelteUI 1.0, with a stable release planned for Q4 2024. If you'd like to get an early look at the new version and provide feedback, please check out the beta / preview branch.

Note that the preview branch is not available yet as we are still in alpha

We'll be sharing regular updates on the rewrite progress, as well as sneak peeks of new features and improvements, through our communication channels (e.g. GitHub Discussions, Reddit, Discord, etc.). Stay tuned!

Thank you for your continued support and patience as we work to make SvelteUI even better. We're excited about the future of Svelte and can't wait to share what we've been cooking up.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns!

The SvelteUI Team 💙

[Coderboi7x]

Wow!
Thanks for the update!

[lin72h]

Very exciting about the your update good timing, Svelte 5.0 will be very near

[isrealbm]

I love it. The founder and team are passionate people.

[JBloss1517]

Thank you for all of your hard work. Looking forward to seeing this go live!

[ericschmar]

Thank you very much for all your hard work. Now that Svelte 5 is officially released, do you have a timeline on this line of work?

[indigo-jay]

Starting to get concerned - seems like radio silence both here and on the SvelteUI discord. Is it time to start looking at replacement component libraries? I really don't want to, but I'm understandably concerned.

[BeeMargarida]

Hey, the development has been stuck for a while, we haven't been able to find time to complete the migration.

I saw the bug report with the error that's causing the library to be unusable with svelte 5, I'm going to take a look when I have some time. Hopefully we can fix that so that the lib is still usable while the migration is ongoing.

[indigo-jay]

Thanks for the update.

[uvulpos]

Since Svelte 5 is now officially released and the default version for new projects, are there ideas how to make svelteui at least usable till the rewrite is done? Currently the svelte/internal call seems to break everything

[BeeMargarida]

Working on it, but can't give a timeline yet

[iva2k]

@BeeMargarida perhaps you can find this patch useful (I rolled it to make TotalApp buildable with SvelteUI, and it seems to work under svelte 5)
https://github.com/iva2k/total-app/blob/ui-svelteui/patches/%40svelteuidev__core%400.15.7.patch

[JBloss1517]

I can see you guys are working really hard on getting this over the finish line. Are there known places someone might be able to jump in and contribute? I am looking to switch to Svelte 5 (and the wonderful runes that come with it), but just waiting on this library to support it.

[uvulpos]

If you want to use runes, you have to wait anyway. But to the maintainers: could you guys create a new milestone in your issue tab so we have a more easy to read roadmap where we also might help to contribute? I would volunteer a bit to support you if possible.

The readme is a bit short for finer details, progress bar and pr reference

[BeeMargarida]

Hey, we are almost at the finish line, right now I'm just going through all the components and testing them. There are still some bugs to fix, hopefully they are all easy 😅
After the migration there's still stuff to do, specially getting some existing tests to work again and getting storybook migrated (why do they always have massive breaking changes? 😢). So, after the migration, I'll be updating README, and perhaps things on the roadmap. We are also thinking of changing our styling solution for the 1.0 release, but it's gonna be a ton of work, not sure yet how that will look like.

[ericschmar]

In my humble opinion, I think you should wait on the styling solution and instead get 1.0 out with Svelte 5 support.