In Svelte 3 and 4, components were classes under the hood, and the base class was `SvelteComponent`. This class was also used in language tools to properly type check the template code.
In Svelte 5, components are functions. To give people a way to extend them programmatically, it would be good to expose the actual shape of components. This is why this PR introduces a new `Component` type.
For backwards compatibility reasons, we can't just get rid of the old class-based types. We also need to ensure that language tools can work with both the new and old types: There are many libraries out there that provide `d.ts` files with type definitions written using the class types - these should not error.
That's why there's an accompagning language tools PR (https://github.com/sveltejs/language-tools/pull/2380) that's doing the heavy lifting: Instead of generating classes, it now generates a constant and an interfaces and uses Typescript's declaration merging feature to provide both so we can declare a component export as being both a class and a function. That ensures that people can still instantiate them with `new` (which they can do if they use the `legacy.componentApi` compiler option), and it also ensure we don't need to adjust any other code generation mechanisms in language tools yet - from a language tools perspective, classes are still the norm. But through exposing the default export as being _also_ callable as a function we can in a future Svelte version, where classes/the Svelte 4 syntax are removed completely, seamlessly switch over to using functions in the code generation, too, and the `d.ts` files generated up until that point will support it because of the dual shape. This way we have both backwards and forwards compatibility.
Simon H