serve-static VS polka

Extensions vs Directory Express issue

Express.js, with its long-lived version 4 is famous for its somewhat low performance. Other projects like fastify or polka have benchmarks outperforming Express.js. I don’t know why Express is slower, maybe because of regex processing of routes? If you’re using parametric routes like /users/:userid/entity and have no regexp routes, then replacing Express.js with fastify or polka will add a performance boost to your app. They are not direct replacements, but you can convert code if you really need that boost. In the article below benchmarks shows huge improvement, but in reality, your code will be a limiting factor to your app performance, and you are unlikely notice any improvement.

- once released and popular, they cease getting frequent updates

Now, yes this is a generalization. It doesn't apply to all of their packages, and not at the same point in time. But there is a pattern there. Some quick diving into the author's Github account, and their more popular repos shows the pattern. It's also clear that this was a choice made by a Svelte contributor to use their own package for "official" support in Svelte Kit.

When it comes to polka itself, I just don't get why a maturing framework like Svelte would choose something whose only real advantage lies in micro-benchmarking porn [1]. Speculation aside, I'm surprised the Svelte team didn't look at that choice through a lens of higher scrutiny. Koa would have been an infinitely better choice in my personal opinion, and there are several community-driven setups [2][3] for it.

[1] https://github.com/lukeed/polka#benchmarks

[2] https://github.com/kaladivo/svelte-kit-koa-boilerplate

[3] https://blog.logrocket.com/sapper-svelte-tutorial-2021/

Check out polka if you haven’t. It’s far leaner, and faster.

polka link

Sapper, by default, uses polka as the server. I decided to use express instead.

Learn something new every day. This is awesome I could probably use polka instead of express.