Solidjs: Simple and performant reactivity for building user interfaces

Having used Solid on a largish web product for over a year, I am thoroughly convinced and will not be returning to React in the future.

This is somewhat of an aside: I am aware that the creator of Solid has long been experimenting with adding laziness to the reactive system. I think it would be a mistake. That everything is immediate keeps state changes intuitive, fairly easy to debug, and is one of the strong points of Solid's design. I've never run into a real world scenario where delaying computations seemed like an optimal way of solving a given problem.

Portions of the react community are excited about how it's starting to feel more like PHP with the movement towards server actions in "client" code etc

I personally don't like that direction so looking forward to exploring new frameworks.

What I've generally liked about React/Next setups is that the code is generally explicit and less magic (I also have gripes with hooks feeling like magic). Things like Vue/Svelte where they mash together css and js in the same file if you want kind of turns me off.

Does anyone know if SolidJs projects are fully js?

Can a SolidJS or an other non-React user chime in to explain what their experience is when using a more `modern|unorthodox` framework for a data-heavy SPA that uses lots of components?

For react you have got Mui(x). Especially the datagrid with the myriad of options is something which I cannot fathom to rebuild myself. I mean, look at this [0], which just is about the grouping options.

When I see other component libraries I think: nice, this is only 10% of what I need. So I am curious if and how people use non-React stuff to build `heavy` SPA applications. Maybe I can learn something.

For me the selling points for React are:

  - functional: components are pure functions 
    (with caveats 1. as much as possible; 2. from a dev experience)

  - large component libraries. High quality, battle tested, and well documented.

0. https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/row-grouping/

At some point, the creator of SolidJS, Ryan Carniato did a stint helping developing Marko.js, a fine-grained reactive / compiled / a bit HTMX-like system, and blogged about that. It's a framework that originated from eBay. I'm now quite interested about the next version of Marko.js, Marko.js 6, and I'm gonna try it for my new project.

I'm interested in fine-graned reactivity so Svelte and SolidJS have been on my radar, but the HTMX-style approach appeals to me.

Here's something to munch on:

https://dev.to/ryansolid/marko-compiling-fine-grained-reacti...

https://dev.to/this-is-learning/marko-for-sites-solid-for-ap...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1dd09rxny4

My full time job is with React and my side projects are build with Solid.

I gave a presentation in the office about Solid a while ago and one of the guys said: "So this looks like React, it's easier to understand, it's faster, smaller, with more build in stuff... why are we not using it?"

Ryan, the creator of Solid, mentioned in one of his interviews that the fact Solid is gaining traction slowly is actually a sign that the web has matured. People are no longer as quick to jump to the next flashy thing - and I agree.

The annoying thing about solid coming from react is that every prop for every component needs to be a function that returns a value instead of just a value, otherwise that prop can never be updated.

I love Solid so much. It has feature parity with React and is faster. However, most importantly, it's just 1,823 well organized commits (1,329 of which belong to the creator). That gives me confidence to keep it around long term.

React is unreadable and bloated with 20,368 commits and seemingly unstable with the maintainers always pivoting it around. I like it's semantics, but don't want to deal with updating it long term as a dependency.

Ok, you've got my attention with documentation like this

const [first, setFirst] = createSignal("JSON");

const [last, setLast] = createSignal("Bourne");

I'm a big fan of Solid. It's a very influential community, however it's not widely used. All the pieces are there. I just don't see tons of marketing or real app/product/dx focus from them.

Look out for their upcoming 2.0 release, it's supposedly gonna be something special.

SolidJS and dom-expressions are the best things that have happened in the front-end since React, it is influencing the whole ecosystem, from templating to Signals. It will be very, very hard to come up with better ideas, it may not be that popular, but it's leading the way.

Genuine question:

Why would you use Solid instead of Svelte?

I'm coming from React and most alternatives seem quite similar to me. Only Svelte does things very differently with its compiler. Vue and Solid just seem to be a different flavour of React.

I've been interested on dipping my toes in Solid for a while, but I've heard there's a 2.0 coming soon and I don't want to bother learning Solid in detail if there's going to be a lot of breaking changes soon.

Does anyone know the status of 2.0?

Is there equvalent to SvelteKit for Solidjs?

It’s been an absolute joy to write Solid the last few years. After a workday of writing React, it always feels so liberating to come home to my personal solidjs code. When used with solid-primitives it feels very expressive and powerful. But mainly I think reactivity just jives with my mental model better than React’s top-down “rerender everything unless it’s a memo” approach. All that said, concerns about the solidjs ecosystem are valid. For example, if you want to use trpc your options are either to use v10 with an unmaintained adapter, or use v11 but not have the built-in support for tanstack-query that you would get with an adapter. Similarly, if you want to use framer motion, you’ll be a few versions behind the React folks. As someone who loves building my own stuff, usually ecosystem limitations don’t bother me too much, but it can feel frustrating to not get to use all the latest things available in the react ecosystem.

I think it's kinda wild how much more fun I have with Solid after slogging through React stuff all day - you think tech like this actually stays small by design or is it just hard to get people to switch?

This is a genuine question: is the main advantage of Solid over React that it's faster?

svelte is far far superior to this. Instead of the verbose JSX or whatever that weird syntax is called, you literally write plain HTML in svelte and feels absolutely natural to do so

The frameworks never care to show about what the debugging experience is like. When my code fails in an unusual way (or usual) way, am I going to have to crawl up the ass of some framework? Will I be knee deep in some crazy stack race that was run from an event loop, that hides my original event or action and forces me to retreat back to the stone ages of console.log statements? Do sourcemaps even work? Hell, have you even tried to debug your own thing? What's that like?

i'm personally a fan of ivi-js.

it has blindingly fast perf (edges out Solid by a bit), top-down data flow, with fine-grained diffing, tagged template syntax, real closure state without rules-of-hooks weirdness and waste, super efficient mem use, and no special reactive primitives like signals/observables/proxies to get that performance, so you could use it with complex serialized/able state over wire (which is not something you can do with reactive primitives).

https://github.com/localvoid/ivi

Has anyone used both Solid and Vue? How do the two compare?

As with nutritional products, I feel that every JavaScript framework of library should have a 'Best before' date stamped on it somewhere. I apologize for the snark, but as an outsider to the JS ecosystem it really looks like a jungle from the Cretaceous period.

So is Solid kind of like React but easier to use?

very few apps actually need reactivity.

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Nice, but Mikado is faster