Rich Harris is a British software developer known for creating Svelte and Rollup. His willingness to question fundamental assumptions about JavaScript frameworks and bundlers produced innovations that influenced the entire ecosystem.
Background
Harris worked as a journalist and interactive graphics developer at The Guardian and later The New York Times. Building data visualizations with tight performance requirements informed his focus on efficiency.
Creating Rollup
In 2015, Harris created Rollup to explore ES module bundling. Rollup pioneered tree-shaking—eliminating unused code—which was subsequently adopted by webpack and other bundlers.
Creating Svelte
Harris created Svelte in 2016, questioning why frameworks needed runtime overhead. By compiling components to vanilla JavaScript, Svelte eliminates the virtual DOM and framework code, producing smaller and faster applications.
Philosophy
Harris approaches problems by questioning assumptions:
- “Why do we need a virtual DOM?”
- “Why ship framework code to browsers?”
- “What if reactivity happened at compile time?”
This questioning led to fundamentally different solutions.
Vercel
Harris joined Vercel in 2021 to work on Svelte full-time. This allowed accelerated development of SvelteKit and broader Svelte adoption.