Svelte 5 2025 Review: Runes and Other Exciting New Features
Svelte has ranked as the most-loved front-end framework for several years. It’s winning developers over with its simplicity, efficiency, and most importantly, an incredibly satisfying developer experience.
So when the Svelte core team decided to rebuild the framework from the ground up – effectively reworking the very things that makes it so loved – it raised some eyebrows. Many developers in the community (myself included) were asking, “Why change something that’s working so well?”
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In this article, I want to explore why these changes were necessary. We’ll dig into some key questions to understand the changes, including how they work, and how these changes helped turn Svelte into a smaller, faster, and even more efficient UI framework.
What is Svelte?
Svelte is a modern JavaScript framework used to build interactive user interfaces (UIs). Unlike traditional frameworks like React, Angular or Vue, that are shipped to act as code interpreters at runtime, Svelte acts as a compiler that ships JavaScript code, resulting in faster apps with smaller bundles and minimal runtime overhead. This unique approach eliminates the need for a virtual DOM, making Svelte applications far more performant.
Why Developers Love Svelte (Simplicity, Speed, DX)
There are a ton of reasons developers love Svelte. Primarily, though, it’s that Svelte does things very differently from React, Vue, Angular, and most front-end frameworks. In my opinion, Svelte’s popularity boils down to three things: simplicity, performance, and developer experience.