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React Ships 42 KB to Say Hello and Svelte Ships 1.6

Coders Stop

7 min read9 hours ago

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Here is a party trick. Spin up a brand new React app, write the one component that renders the word “Hello”, build it for production, and open the bundle. You just shipped around 42 kilobytes of gzipped JavaScript to say a single word. Do the exact same thing in Svelte and you ship about 1.6.

That is not a typo and it is not a rigged benchmark. It is the number that has followed React around for years, and it came back into the conversation on October 1, when SvelteKit 3 and the Svelte CLI ( sv ) 1.0.0 both landed on the same day. The Svelte team called the release "the same framework with a little more polish, a little more type safety, and a little less junk." Config moved into vite.config.ts , the $lib alias became #lib through standard subpath imports, and sv hitting 1.0 finally made the community add-on API official.…