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Qwik is a daring rethink of how reactive UIs work. The core premise is that the framework is built from the ground up to deliver HTML with minimal JavaScript—just enough JavaScript to incrementally introduce interactivity as needed.
Qwik uses a fine-grained model for isolating the segments of the app that are hydrated on an as-needed basis. By starting from first principles, Qwik allows for otherwise unattainable performance and represents an alternative path for the evolution of front-end JavaScript.
State of Qwik
Qwik is still in early releases, but it has come a long way since we first got a look at it. There is now a full-featured example at StackBlitz, a REPL playground, and a command line tool. Qwik has also evolved to support a more developer-friendly, React-like syntax. Under the hood is still an advanced, one-of-a-kind reactive engine that defines reactive boundaries along state, templates, and listeners.
Resumability
Qwik uses a combination of clever server-side and client-side rendering to avoid the kind of double taxation that contemporary frameworks suffer in performing the hydration work twice, once on the server, and again on the client.
As Qwik creator Misko Hevery writes:
The basic idea behind Qwik is that it is resumable. It can continue where the server left off. There is but the tiniest amount of code to execute on the client.
Or, put another way: Let the server set up an HTML page as fully functional as possible, and allow the client to perform the smallest amount of work possible to continue, or resume, the process for the user.
The typical flow in reactive frameworks with SSR (server-side rendering) is to first generate a version of the app on the server, then ship it over to the client, which renders the scaffolded app. At that point, the client-side app takes over, basically having to bootstrap the same app again in order to wire together a functioning client.
This process is known as hydration. There are several clever ways to try to make hydration more efficient, but Qwik abandons those for a new process called resumability.
Resumability means the client can pick up where the server left off, without having to rebuild the app on the client.
Time to interactive
The metric that Qwik strives...