stencil VS lwc

First a disclosure: I never actually used Stencil, only played with it a bit locally in a hello-world project while writing this post.

This is my main concern too.

I don't understand why tools like this "pick a winner" with a specific framework instead of rendering to Web Components with a framework wrapper, or using something like Stencil[1] that can render to any framework.

[1] https://stenciljs.com/

I was recently able to sit down with some of the core members of Ionic, who also created Stencil a toolchain for building Design Systems and Progressive Web Apps. We talked at great length how typically companies are approaching Ionic from a Design Team and need help building components. As a developer I wanted to talk about the Web Components that are used within the Design System first. There was a decent amount of surprise, so I thought I would break down what a Design System is and why it doesn't matter which end you start with, as long as you have both your Design and Development teams working together to build your Design System.

Examples like this bug me. The React example is using a high level abstraction, the web component is directly using the API. A more accurate example would show how those React calls eventually boil down to document.createElement()

I don’t think the Web Components API was meant to be used directly all the time. You can use a framework like StencilJS:

https://stenciljs.com/

You might say that this is the same vicious cycle as JavaScript frameworks. That's wrong, because Web Components are interoperable by design. Choosing Stencil or Lit or any other library is a development convenience that has little to do with the interoperability of the resulting components.

Not sure about Vue but you can in Angular, though my experience with React components in Angular has not been pleasant. Libraries such as Stencil allow you to create native Web Componets from React components.

I guess my problem is more specific to my overall architecture. I have components that when are placed in the DOM, have props rendered on them by their parent elements. I'm using stencil to do this.

Actually I was wondering if lwc oss is still a thing. The website lwc.dev looks like it hasn't been updated since the release in 2019. Are many people using it or was it a nice try by Salesforce but can we consider it dead? I know of course it can't compete with react, vue or angular, but has it built a nice user base around it to keep it interesting?

Web component browser APIs aren't that many, and not that hard to grasp (if you don't know about them, have a look at Google's Learn HTML section and MDN's Web Components guide); but creating a web component actually requires taking care of many small things. This is where web component libraries come in very handy, freeing us of having to think about some of those things by taking care of them for us. Most of the things I'll mention here are handled one way of another by other libraries (GitHub's Catalyst, Haunted, Hybrids, Salesforce's LWC, Slim.JS, Ionic's Stencil) but I'll focus on Google's Lit and Microsoft's FAST here as they probably are the most used web component libraries out there (ok, I lied, Lit definitely is, FAST not that much, far behind Lit and Stencil; but Lit and FAST have many things in common, starting with the fact that they are just native web components, contrary to Stencil that compiles to a web component). Both Lit and FAST leverage TypeScript decorators to simplify the code even further so I'll use that in examples, even though they can also be used in pure JS (decorators are coming to JS soon BTW). I'll also leave the most apparent yet most complex aspect for the end.

Now in Alba’s role, she and her team use Lightning Web Components (LWC) to create custom user interfaces, a framework based on Web Components standards. With LWC, Alba creates components using modern, standard JavaScript. This means the skills that she learned previously are transferable to other JavaScript-based technologies. She pointed out that on top of this transferability, LWC is open source, and developers can use it outside of the Salesforce platform. Components can be used in Lightning App Builder and published on the AppExchange for other customers to use them.

Lightning Web Components (LWC) from Salesforce are based on standard Web Components built using HTML and JavaScript. They are lightweight, easy to build, and perform well in modern browsers. When building LWCs, you’ll become familiar with the concept of composition: piecing together simple building-block components within the body of a more complex component.

Indeed. Ever built anything in LWR+LWC opensource? It's opensource where you don't get to open its source. Most of the documentation is a mess between outdated Aura components and their new lwc.dev site which has like 2% of the material you actually need.

If you want to use LWC outside of Salesforce to build a website, check out LWC OSS

Salesforce developed Lightning Web Components (LWC) as a fast, enterprise-grade wrapper around vanilla web components. LWC is built on the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that powers the web, so any analyzer for those languages can be applied here.