svelte-headlessui VS polka

As a side note, my project was the first to be published under the name svelte-headlessui and is both more popular and more complete than the other project. I don't know why the other guy picked an identical name but it drives me a little nuts because of how unnecessarily confusing it is.

There is an unofficial Svelte port here but it doesn’t appear to be maintained so there may be a better option… that said there are a ton of better options if you want to use Tailwind with Svelte.

This and passing styles to slots, are biggest bottlenecks in wrapping components (your use case) and creating headless components (see headless ui).

Headless UI as in svelte-headlessui?

Svelte Headless UI should get some new PRs merged soon based on some comments u/ryangossiaux posted in the repo less than a week ago. He stepped away from the project for a bit after putting in a tremendous amount of work into it, and as someone who has used his library alongside Tailwinds UI on a number of projects, I’m super thankful for what he’s managed to do, and I hope that more people from the community will help support the project.

Just in case you haven't seen it, I ported Headless UI to Svelte recently: https://github.com/rgossiaux/svelte-headlessui

About two weeks into my first project I did purchase Tailwind UI. It is a massively useful resource, and I use it several times a week. It is a great reference tool, and is being actively added to. I have definitely recovered my initial investment in time saved. If you're using React or Vue, it is a no brainer - support if first class (along with Headless UI). I actually pivoted to SvelteKit, and started using the Tailwind UI HTML components until recently when this dropped: https://github.com/rgossiaux/svelte-headlessui. I now start with the React component.

Sure, it's here. Unfortunately I'm still writing independent documentation--and as we know from the survey, documentation is the most important part of a library :)

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/

> sveltekit provides some kind of thin layer on top of express

It doesn't use express, but something named polka [1], which is much less mature. Bugs in polka have caused downtime and remote DOS vulnerabilities in my sveltekit app multiple times.

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

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.