Component Unmount: Allow non-duration based outro animations

I am struggling to use a spring-based animation for component outros (unmounting the DOM element). As far as I can tell, the only way to defer/delay the unmount/outro of a component is to use the transition or out directive and return an transition object with a specified duration:

{
  duration: 400,
  easing: ...
}

This works great for easing functions, but I cannot use Svelte’s spring() function for the outro transition, because it has no fixed duration.

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Proposal/Potential solution

My proposed solution is for the transition, in and out directives to accept a function that optionally returns a Promise instead of a Transition object. Once the Promise fulfills (or rejects), Svelte can remove the element from the DOM.

Example REPL for illustration: https://svelte.dev/repl/cc1467f851284051a11ca0325c2efd97?version=3.12.1

Alternative I have considered

One alternative I’ve considered, is pre-calculating a duration for the spring and using that as the duration value in the transition object. This approach has one disadvantage: springs are inherently dynamic, so the animation distance changes how long the spring takes to finish (its duration), which makes a static pre-calculation (i.e. one pre-calculated duration per spring-config) of the spring not possible.

It may be be possible to predict the duration relatively accurately based on the spring config (damping, stiffness, mass, …) and the travel distance, but that is a considerable amount of work for something which Just Works™ when using normal easing transitions.

Additional context

Svelte puts a lot of focus into “making UI interactions and animations as easy as possible”. For that matter, Svelte even provides its own Spring-based animation API. So it would make sense to allow to use Svelte’s spring() function (or third-party ones) for outro transitions.

If this addition is feasible and wanted, it may also make sense to revisit some of the built in animation functions like fade and slide to make it possible to use them also with a spring.

How important is this feature to me? Right now, I am trying to evaluate to port an existing project to Svelte. This existing project has spring-based outro animations in a few places (pages, menus). It’s not a dealbreaker, but seems like an unfortunate limitation.

In my opinion, spring interactions and animations are superior to fixed (duration based) easings and feel more intuitive.

Similar “defered unmount” discussion over at React: https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/issues/128

Potential drawback: One drawback of the Promise based approach as I proposed it above is, that the author has to handle the animation themselves. I.e. I have to get a reference to the DOM element and do stuff with it, instead of letting Svelte handle it. But this may be necessary nontheless when the author wants to use a third-party library, such as Popmotion.

What about Intro transitions: In general, my proposal is also about intro animations. But it is not such a big of a problem, because you can roll your own intro animation logic within an onMount() handler. In the case of the outro animation, there is no real workaround that I am aware of, which is why I primarily focused on that.

[pushkine]

@russellgoldenberg it will come built in to #4742

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