Microsoft shrunk the TypeScript

#​640 — May 25, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny Thingamabobs — DeviceScript is a new Microsoft effort to take the TypeScript experience to low-resource microcontroller-based devices. It’s compiled to a custom VM bytecode which can run in such constrained environments. (A bit like Go’s TinyGo.) It’s aimed at VS Code users but there’s a CLI option too.

Microsoft

The State of Node.js Performance in 2023 — Node 20 gets put through its paces against 18.16 and 16.20 with a few different benchmark suites running on an EC2 instance. It goes into a lot of depth that’s worth checking out, but if you haven’t got time, the conclusion is “Node 20 is faster.” Good.

Rafael Gonzaga

Lightning Fast JavaScript Data Grid Widget — Try a professional JS data grid component which lets you edit, sort, group and filter datasets with fantastic UX & performance. Includes a TreeGrid, API docs and lots of demos. Seamlessly integrates with React, Angular & Vue apps.

Bryntum Grid sponsor

Deno 1.34: Now deno compile Supports npm PackagesDeno isn’t Node, but it increasingly likes to wear a Node-shaped costume. This release focuses on npm and Node compatibility and Deno’s compile command (for turning projects into single binary executables) now supports npm packages too which opens up a lot of use cases.

The Deno Team

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

TC39’s Hemanth.HM shares some updates from TC39’s 96th meeting. Atomics.waitAsync, the /v flag for regexes, and a method to detect well formatted Unicode strings all move up to stage 4.

The Angular team shares the results of their annual developer survey. Over 12,000 Angular developers responded.

RELEASES:

Astro 2.5

Preact 10.15 – Fast 3KB React alternative.

TypeScript 5.1 RC

Electron 24.4

MapLibre GL JS v3 – WebGL-powered vector tile maps.

???? Articles & Tutorials

Demystifying Tupper’s FormulaTupper’s self-referential formula is a formula that, when plotted, can represent itself. Confused? Luckily Eli shows us how simple the concept is and how to use JavaScript to render your own.

Eli Bendersky

An Introduction to Web Components — A practical and straightforward introduction to using the custom element API now supported in all major browsers to create a basic tabbed panel.

Mohamed Rasvi

▶  Creative Coding with p5.js in Visual Studio Codep5.js is a ‘creative coding’ library that takes a lot of inspiration from Processing. Dan does a great job at showing it off and sharing his enthusiasm for it. The main content starts at about 8-minutes in.

Daniel Shiffman and Olivia Guzzardo

Auth. Built for Devs, by Devs — Easily add login, registration, SSO, MFA, user controls and more auth features to your app in any framework.

FusionAuth sponsor

▶  Why React is Here to Stay — A rebuttal of sorts to Adam Elmore’s video from two weeks ago: ▶️ I’m Done with React.

Joscha Neske

Comparing Three Ways of Processing Arrays Non-Destructively — for-of, .reduce(), and .flatMap() go up against each other.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Build Your First JavaScript ChatGPT Plugin — Plugins provide a way to extend ChatGPT’s functionality.

Mark O’Neill

How I’ve Shifted My Angular App to a Standalone Components Approach

Kamil Konopka

???? Code & Tools

Javy 1.0: A JS to WebAssembly Toolchain — Originally built at Shopify, Java takes your JS code and runs it in a WASM-embedded runtime. It’s worth scanning the example to get a feel for the process. “We’re confident that the Javy CLI is in good enough shape for general use so we’re releasing it as v1.0.0.”

Bytecode Alliance

Inkline 4.0: A Customizable Vue.js 3 UI/UX Library — A design system and numerous customizable components designed for mobile-first (but desktop friendly) and built with accessibility in mind.

Alex Grozav

Dynaboard: A Visual Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

BlockNote: A ‘Notion-Like’ Block-Based Text Editor — Flexible and presents an extensive API so you can integrate it with whatever you want to do. You can drag and drop blocks, add real-time collaboration, add customizable ‘slash command’ menus, and more. Builds on top of ProseMirror and TipTap.

TypeCell

Windstatic: A Set of 170+ Components and Layouts Made with Tailwind and Alpine.js — Categorized under page sections, nav, and forms, and each category includes multiple components you can drop into projects.

Michael Andreuzza

ls-lint 2.0: A Fast File and Directory Name Linter — Written in Go but aimed at JS/front-end dev use cases, ls-lint provides a way to enforce rules for file naming and directory structures.

Lucas Löffel

Jest Puppeteer 9.0: Run Tests using Jest and Puppeteer — A Jest preset enabling end-to-end testing with Puppeteer.

Argos CI

ts-sql-query: Type-Safe SQL Query Builder — Want to build dynamic SQL queries in a type-safe way with TypeScript verifying queries? This is for you. Supports numerous SQL-based database systems and isn’t an ORM itself.

Juan Luis Paz Rojas

React Authentication, Simplified

Userfront sponsor

Hashids.js 2.3
↳ Generate YouTube-like IDs.

Tabulator 5.5
↳ Interactive table and data grid control.

gridstack.js 8.2
↳ Dashboard layout and creation library.

Cypress GitHub Action 5.8
↳ Action for running Cypress end-to-end tests.

ReacType 16.0
↳ Visual prototyping tool that exports React code.

Mongoose 7.2 – MongoDB modelling library.

Eta (η) 2.2 – Embedded JS template engine.

AVA 5.3 – Popular Node test runner.

MelonJS 15.3 – HTML5 game engine.

???? Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Fullstack Engineer at Everfund.com — Push code, change lives. Help us become the center for good causes on the modern web with our dev tools.

Everfund

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

???? Node.js developer? Check out the latest issue of Node Weekly, our sibling newsletter about all things Node.js — from tutorials and screencasts to news and releases. While we include some Node related items here in JavaScript Weekly, we save most of it for there.

→ Check out Node Weekly here.

Bringing JavaScript to WebAssembly

#​625 — February 10, 2023

Read on the Web

It looked quiet at first but wow, what an epic week this turned out to be. There’s a lot to chew on here, and we even have a variety of bonus items at the very end of this issue. Enjoy!
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: It’s ESLint’s Turn — Last year we featured an article from the same author about how he was finding, and fixing, low-hanging performance fruit in popular JavaScript projects. He’s back, and he’s found a lot of potential for savings in ESLint this time.

Marvin Hagemeister

The Future (and the Past) of the Web is Server Side Rendering — It’s fair to say the Deno folks have some skin in this game, but nonetheless this is a neat brief history of server-side rendering and why they feel it’s the right approach for modern web development.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

Monitoring Your NestJS Application with AppSignal — With AppSignal, you can monitor your NestJS app with ease and rely on OpenTelemetry to handle third-party instrumentations. AppSignal even provides helper functions to help you build comprehensive custom instrumentation. A box of 🍪 included!

AppSignal sponsor

Ten Web Development Trends in 2023 — Following the State of JS survey results Robin takes a considered look at new web dev trends that we should be paying attention to this year, and why they matter.

Robin Wieruch

Bringing JavaScript to WebAssembly for Shopify Functions — As much as this is focused on a specific use case at Shopify, this is a fascinating look at how they’re integrating JavaScript and WebAssembly under tight constraints. They also talk about Javy, a JS to WebAssembly toolchain being built at Shopify that lets you run JS code on a WASM-embedded JS runtime.

Surma (Shopify)

Google Touts Web-Based Machine Learning with TensorFlow.js

Richard MacManus (The New Stack)

IN BRIEF:

🎉 Time to celebrate — a recent survey allegedly found that JavaScript applications ‘have fewer flaws’ than Java and .NET ones. So there you go.

Honeypot’s highly anticipated ▶️ React.js documentary drops later today – it’ll probably be out by the time you read this.

Vanilla List is a directory of ‘vanilla’ JavaScript controls and plugins.

▶️ Evan You tells us what to expect in 2023 from Vue.js.

The Scala.js project is celebrating its ten year anniversary – it’s now a mature way to build Web projects using Scala, if you prefer.

📅 Vue.js Live is a JavaScript event taking place both in London and online on May 12 & 15. From the same folks as the also forthcoming JSNation conference.

A history of criticisms levelled at React.

RELEASES:

Eleventy / 11ty 2.0
↳ Popular Node.js static site generator.

pnpm 7.27 – The efficient package manager.

RxDB 14.0 – Offline-first, reactive database.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Design Patterns in TypeScript — OO-inspired patterns aren’t for everyone or every use case, but this is a fantastic catalog of examples, complete with diagrams and explanations, if you need to learn to tell apart factory methods from decorators, facades, or proxies.

Refactoring Guru

Resumable React: How To Use React Inside Qwik — Building React apps without ever loading React in the user’s browser? “Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see how this works.”

Yoav Ganbar

Did You Know That You’re Already a Distributed Systems Developer?

Temporal Technologies sponsor

Build a Hacker News Client using Alpine.jsAlpine.js is a thin and elegant reactivity library that lets you add dynamic functionality to your site directly in markup. This is a short and sweet practical example of what you can quickly do with it.

Salai Vedha Viradhan

▶  TypeScript Speedrun: A Crash Course for Beginners — If you want to pick up TypeScript and would find a video guide useful, this is for you. Matt has become well known recently for his educational TypeScript tweets and videos, and this is another good one that flies through the basics. (23 minutes.)

Matt Pocock

Using Notion as a Headless CMS with Nuxt

Trent Brew

The Options API vs Composition API in Vue.js

Charles Allotey

🛠 Code & Tools

Bookmarklet Editor: Easily Work on JavaScript Bookmarklets — Useful because who can remember the exact syntax for a bookmarklet? 🤔 This also can instantly convert code to and from bookmarklet form and includes some examples in the help section (click the big ? to get all the details).

Marek Gibney

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, now with support for Vitest.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Yup 1.0: Super Simple Object Schema Validation — Define a schema, transform a value to match, assert the shape of an existing value, or both. Very extensive docs here.

Jason Quense

Material React Table: A Full-Featured React Table Component — Built upon Material UI 5 and TanStack Table 8. The docs include lots of interactive examples.

Kevin Van Cott

BlockNote: Notion-Style Block-Based Text Editor — Built on top of Prosemirror and Tiptap, this is for you if you like the way the Notion note-taking service’s text editor feels. There’s a live demo.

Yousef

TresJS: Build 3D Experiences with Vue.js — Create 3D scenes with Vue components and Three.js. Think React-three-fiber but Vue flavored.

Alvaro Sabu

depngn: Find Out if Dependencies Support a Given Node.js Version — A CLI tool that establishes whether or not the dependencies in your package.json will work against a specified version of Node.

OmbuLabs

Open-Source JS Form Libraries to Automate Your Form Workflow — Self-host SurveyJS to configure and modify multiple forms, convert them to fillable PDF files, and analyze collected data in interactive dashboards.

SurveyJS sponsor

Lawnmower: Build VR Scenes with Custom HTML Tags — A web component library that leans on Three.js and aims “to make building a basic VR website as easy to make as your first HTML site”.

Gareth Marland

Electron 23.0 Released — The popular cross platform JavaScript, HTML + CSS desktop app framework gets bumped up to Node 18.12.1, Chromium 110, and V8 11.0. Windows 7/8/8.1 support has also been dropped, so we might start to see those versions of Windows lose the support of a lot of Electron based apps soon.

Electron Core Team

Run: Run User-Provided Code in a Web Worker

SLASHD Analytics

💻 Jobs

Software Engineer (Backend) — Join our “kick ass” team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we’re always looking for more exceptional engineers.

Sticker Mule

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

QUICK RELEASES:

vue-easytable 2.23
↳ A data table/grid control for Vue.js. (Demo.)

React-Custom-Scroll 5.0
↳ Customize the browser scroll bar. (Demo.)

react-jsonschema-form 5.1
↳ Component to build Web forms from JSON Schema.

AlaSQL.js 3.1
↳ JavaScript-based SQL database.

jest-puppeteer 7.0
↳ Run tests using Jest & Puppeteer.

MDX 2.3
↳ Markdown for the component era.

🎁 The Bonus Round

✈️ Watching someone wrestle with Python and JavaScript to fly (virtual) planes with Microsoft Flight Simulator tickled me a lot.

A beautiful WebGL2-based fluid simulation. It’s even happy on mobile. Pretty!

Go-like channels in 10 lines of JavaTypeScript..?

🐦 Misko Hevery: “useSignal() is the future of web frameworks and is a better abstraction than useState(), which is showing its age.” (source)

Mike Pennisi asks: when is an object property not a property?

Do you use Postgres at all? Check out Postgres Weekly – one of our sister newsletters. So much is going on in the Postgres space lately and it’s a great way to keep up.