The tale of how static typing came to JavaScript

#​648 — July 20, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

pkg-size: Find the True, Current Size of an npm Package Without Leaving Your Browser — A beautifully designed site that can show you the true size of an npm package (including dependencies) using the actual packages which are ‘installed’ in a browser-based WebContainers-powered environment. Hiroki has 🐦 a Twitter thread where he explains more about how it works.

Hiroki Osame

TypeScript and the Dawn of Gradual Types — From GitHub’s ReadME project comes a thorough journalistic take on how static typing made it into the JavaScript world, what TypeScript offers, some alternative approaches, and the possibility of adding type annotations to JavaScript iself.

Mike Melanson (GitHub)

Create a Real-Time Multi-Host Livestream with Amazon IVS — Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) enables developers to create dynamic video experiences, such as collaborative livestreams with multiple hosts. Click here to learn more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

Storybook 7.1: The Workshop for Building UI Components — v7.1 introduces in-app onboarding for your newest team members, zero-config styling support for Tailwind, MUI, styled-components and MUI, Vue 3 source snippets, and more.

Storybook Team

Five Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript — A brief dose of reality for a world seemingly obsessed with TypeScript: “If you want to get into TypeScript, don’t think you can leave JavaScript behind. It will find you, and it will get you.”

Stefan Baumgartner

🎉 RELEASES:

Fresh 1.3 – The Deno web framework. Plugins can now inject routes and middleware into apps, there’s Deno.serve support, and you can create async route components.

Downshift 8.0 – Primitives to build WAI-ARIA compliant React autocomplete, combobox & select components.

Node.js v18.17.0 (LTS) – Node 18 gets the Ada 2.0 WHATWG URL parser.

Fastify 4.20 – The fast, low overhead web Node.js framework.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Promise.withResolvers proposal has progressed from stage 2 to 3 at TC39, as has the array grouping proposal, as well as source phase imports.

🗣 The folks on Hacker News discussed why the site isn’t being indundated with links to new JavaScript frameworks recently. Has React ‘won’? Has AI stolen the limelight? Or is a JavaScript revolution quietly brewing..?

👴🏻 A blog post from 1996 popped up telling us about the newest JavaScript features in Netscape 3.0 – definitely a blast from the past. Say hello to the typeof operator!

📒 Articles & Tutorials

‘How We Generate JS and Python SDKs from a Canonical Rust SDK’PostgresML is an extension that adds machine learning functions into Postgres. Its team loves and prefers Rust but most of its users are using JavaScript or Python. What to do? Simultaneously write multi-language libraries using Rust..

Silas Marvin (PostgresML)

💡 Psst.. if you use Postgres at all, we have a Postgres newsletter too!

Updating Code with jscodeshiftTypeORM is an ORM for Node that introduced some breaking changes requiring the author to update lots of calls in his code. A perfect time to use a ‘codemod’ to automate the job. Even if you don’t use TypeORM, this post might give you some ideas for other places to use such an approach.

Clinton Blackburn

AI-Proofing Your Career For Tomorrow: Free Session by Interview Kickstart — Discover Your AI Career Path (AI/ML vs Data Science). Take an informed decision: Insights from FAANG+ AI/ML Engineers. Register for a free session.

Interview Kickstart sponsor

How React 18 Improves App Performance — If you’ve not entirely kept up with how things have changed or developed in React with regards to concurrent rendering, transitions, Suspense, and even React Server Components, this is a fantastic review and primer to get up to speed on how React’s newer features dramatically help with performance.

Lydia Hallie (Vercel)

300ms Faster: Measures Taken to Reduce Wikipedia’s Total Blocking Time (TBT)

Nicholas Ray

On the Origins of JSX and Why It Exists

Hristiyan Dodov

🛠 Code & Tools

wavesurfer.js 7: Audio Waveform Player — If you’re creating a podcast player, audio experience, or anything where seeing an interactive audio waveform could be useful, check this out. GitHub repo.

katspaugh and contributors

TOAST UI Grid: A Customizable Grid Control for the Web — A powerful MIT-licensed grid-style control for the display, editing, and management of data. It comes from the same folks as TUI Editor and TUI Calendar and while it’s happy on its own, there are wrappers for Vue and React too. GitHub repo.

NHN

Breakpoints and console.log is the Past, Time Travel is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, karma, jasmine, and more.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Pines: A Library of UI Components for Alpine.js and Tailwind Projects — Includes sliders, tooltips, accordions, modals, and others. The CSS-only components are usable in any Tailwind project while the ones that require JS are designed for use with Alpine.js.

devdojo

YouTube.js 5.5: A Wrapper Around YouTube’s Private API — One of those things you’d expect to be quickly blocked somehow, but it’s 18 months old, so… 😆 The fun isn’t just for Node or Deno users – it’ll work in the browser if you can proxy the requests through your own server.

LuanRT

Eruda 3.0: A Console for Mobile Browsers — If you’re in a situation where you have no access to DevTools, you can add Eruda to your page and it provides a sort of virtual devtools you can use from any browser, including on mobile.

LiriLiri

Reagraph 4.10: WebGL Graph Visualization Library for React — Here’s a basic code example. This week’s release adds support for three dimensional clustering. GitHub repo.

REAGRAPH

brotli-wasm 2.0: A Brotli Compressor and Decompressor — Covers both Node and the browser by means of WebAssembly.

HTTP Toolkit

Pacquet: A New, Experimental Package Manager for Node — From a Node.js core member, no less.

Yagiz Nizipli

Shareon 2.2
↳ Lightweight, stylish ‘share’ buttons for social networks.

Helipopper 8.0
↳ Tooltips and popovers for Angular. (Demos.)

Ink 4.3
↳ React for interactive command-line apps.

📅 React Calendar 4.4

React Chessboard 4.0

💻 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

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

🎵 Thank you for the music..

Chip Player JS: Browser-Based MIDIs, MODs and Game Music — The creator of this site has, like me, a fascination with old digital music – MIDI files, trackers, and the like. Rather than keep an old computer running, he decided to build a browser based music player for such files.

Matt Montag

P.S. If you’re looking for something specific to listen to, the music by famed Norwegian tracker Jogeir Liljedahl is well worth a try – particularly Overture or Guitar Slinger. Or how about Donkey Kong Country’s dreamy Aquatic Ambience? It’s striking how trackers managed to squeeze so much down into a few hundred kilobytes by the heavy reuse and manipulation of samples.

Astro 2.0 and TypeScript 5.0 beta

#​623 — January 27, 2023

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Astro 2.0: The Next-Gen ‘Islands’-Oriented Web Framework — 2.0 includes hybrid rendering (mixing of SSR and SSG outputs), type safety for Markdown & MDX, and an upgrade to Vite 4.0. Astro is worth exploring when performance is key as it works with popular frameworks but lets you deliver the least JS possible to get pages rendered.

Fred Schott

Prefer a talk? Nate Moore’s ViteConf talk ▶️ Islands Architecture, Astro, and You will bring you up to speed.

Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, The Modern Way — If you’ve been leaning on something like Lodash for deep cloning, you might not need to any longer. “It’s been a long time coming, but we finally now have the built-in structuredClone function to make deep cloning objects in JavaScript a breeze.”

Steve Sewell

Go From Professional Web Developer to Lead Engineer — Aspiring lead developer? Our collection of comprehensive video courses cover the fundamentals of JavaScript, TypeScript, React, web performance, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.0 Beta — A new major version number, but users of the popular typed JS superset will face a ‘similar upgrade experience’ to previously. Decorators make it in as a first class feature, significant performance and package size optimizations are present, export type * is supported, all enums are now union enums, and much more.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

AlaSQL.js 3.0: Isomorphic JavaScript SQL Database — A SQL database you can use in the browser, Node.js or mobile apps. An interesting bit of functionality is you can use SQL to query JavaScript objects – example. “The library adds the comfort of a full database engine to your JavaScript app. No, really.”

Andrey Gershun

IN BRIEF:

🏅 If you’re really into Vue.js, you’ll soon be able to become officially certified in it.

If you’re using React, you should be using a React framework, 🐦 says Andrew Clark of the core team.

The creator of alternative JS runtime Bun asks: “If there’s one thing missing from Bun for you to switch, what is it?” You can reply on Twitter.

jQAPI.com is an amazing meeting of old and new JavaScript – it’s an Astro powered version of jQuery’s documentation!

RELEASES:

Shoelace 2.0
↳ Agnostic library of web components.

μFuzzy 1.0
↳ Tiny fuzzy search library.

React Router 6.8

Node.js 19.5.0

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Getting Started with SvelteKit — SvelteKit only recently hit 1.0 and this is a comprehensive overview of how to build a site using the Svelte-oriented app framework. It covers topics like routing, layouts, data, props and more.

Adam Rackis

Using .NET Code from JavaScript using WebAssembly“Starting with .NET 7, you can easily run any .NET method from JavaScript without needing the whole Blazor framework.”

Gérald Barré

JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code (2m+ Downloads) — Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby.js sponsor

scrollend: A New JavaScript Event — Finally an event you won’t need a hotel booking for. scrollend provides a new way to detect that a scrolling operation is complete in the browser. Is it another Chrome-only nicety? Surprisingly not – Firefox 109+ supports it too.

Adam Argyle (Chrome Team)

Packaging Rust Apps for the npm Registry — Isn’t npm just for JavaScript projects? Nope. Node is required to make this technique work, but as long as you can package and execute a binary, you’re good to go.

Orhun Parmaksız

Making Sense of TypeScript using Set Theory — This article certainly doesn’t hang around. Neat diagrams too.

Vladimir Klepov

React Authentication, Simplified

Userfront sponsor

Accessible Hamburger Buttons without JavaScript — Sometimes you need to consider if modern techniques allow you to avoid JavaScript. Here’s a CodePen if you want to play.

Pausly

While we’re on the topic of less JavaScript, the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast ▶️ ‘The less JavaScript, the better’ focuses on Astro.

🛠 Code & Tools

Uppy 3.4: Powerful, Modular JavaScript File Uploader — Upload not just from local sources but even Dropbox or Instagram. Integrates with popular frameworks and supports resumable uploads. GitHub repo.

Transloadit

Nut.js 3.0: Desktop Automation from Node — Take control of your desktop (Windows, macOS or Linux) in code with control over keyboard + pointer, along with image matching functionality. GitHub repo.

Simon Hofmann

Optimize Your Systems’ Performance With TelemetryHub – Real-Time Data Monitoring & Analysis — An advanced data visualization and analysis tool that can help you identify and resolve unseen issues in your environment. Try free.

TelemetryHub by Scout sponsor

Eleventy v2.0: First Beta of the Popular Site GeneratorEleventy is a popular Node.js static site generator and v2.0 includes enough major changes that a thorough beta is needed. The creator ▶️ made this quick video about the release.

Zach Leatherman

Mock Service Worker 1.0: API Mocking Library for Browser and Node — Intercepts requests which you can then mock. Capture outgoing requests using an Express-like routing syntax, complete with parameters, wildcards, and regexes. GitHub repo.

Artem Zakharchenko

Drift: A Self-Hostable Gist-Like / Pastebin Service — Built with Next.js 13.

Max Leiter

Dygraphs 2.2
↳ Interactive charts of time series data.

actions/github-script 6.4
↳ Write GitHub Actions workflows in JS.

Playwright 1.30
↳ Browser automation framework.

Faast.js 6.4
↳ Serverlessly call JS functions on AWS Lambda & Google Cloud Functions.

Cypress 12.4
↳ Testing framework for anything in a browser.

D3plus 2.1
↳ Extend D3.js with more visualization types.

💻 Jobs

Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world 🚀

CKEditor

Senior Full-Stack Engineer – React + TypeScript — Come help Qwire modernize how studios, composers, artists, publishers, labels, and the rest of the industry manage music rights.

Qwire

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.

Hired