Will 2022 be the year of Solid.js?

Solid.js was on fire this month! 🔥

When Solid celebrated its 1.0 release last July, I was a bit worried that it wasn’t generating enough of buzz and hype necessary to reach the level of success it deserved. Well, I’m extremely pleased to report that I was 100% wrong then!

In fact, the following events in February 2022 strongly testify to how Solid is now on solid ground for its long-term growth:

• In the State of JavaScript 2021 survey, Solid ranked the top in satisfaction and second in interest for front-end frameworks.

• Also in the same survey, Ryan Carniato, Solid’s creator, was voted to be one of the top people to follow.

• Solid scored financial sponsorship from Vercel.

• JS Party, one of the most popular podcasts in the JavaScript space, featured Solid in its recent episode.

• SolidHack, a public hackathon with total prize amounting to $12,000, has begun receiving submissions.

Now at v1.3 and equipped with its top-tier performance and an array of cutting-edge features (e.g. concurrent rendering, custom renderer, Async & streaming SSR), Solid seems amply ready to tackle building real-world apps. This is especially true thanks to the combination of quality starter templates and SSR examples.

This, of course, is not to downplay the fact that there still remain some critical missing pieces in the ecosystem—most notably, the lack of DevTools to visually aid inspecting and debugging of Solid apps. It’s long been recognized as an important gap, and I hope that the ongoing SolidHack gives birth to a viable DevTools solution. Other key missing pieces include a metaframework to facilitate building more sophisticated apps and UI component libraries, but they are being currently worked on and I’m certain will be adequately solved soon enough.

Will 2022 be Solid’s year? I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s off to a great start so I sure am feeling optimistic.