The heaviest npm packages

The State of ES5 on the Web — Some of the earlier JavaScript build tools focused on allowing developers to write modern JavaScript code that could still run on the browsers of the time by compiling code down to ES5. Time has moved on, but have the tools or popular libraries? Philip investigates, and shares some recommendations.

Philip Walton

📊  The Top 5000 npm Packages by Size, Downloads, and Traffic — An interesting Google Sheets spreadsheet listing the top 5000 npm packages by package size, weekly downloads, and weekly traffic. One package is responsible for 278 terabytes of traffic per week, but the top 5000 add up to several petabytes.

Google Sheets / danhorus

Run GitHub Actions Up to 2x Faster at Half the Cost — Blacksmith runs your GitHub Actions substantially faster by running them on modern gaming CPUs. Integrating Blacksmith is a one-line code change. 100+ companies like Ashby, Superblocks, and Slope use Blacksmith to help developers merge code faster.

Blacksmith

Announcing TypeScript 5.6 — The latest TypeScript has landed with full support for iterator helpers, support for arbitrary module identifiers, --noUncheckedSideEffectImports to import modules without importing any values, and more — all covered in the always thorough release post.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Is PHP the New JavaScript? — I’m no real fan of PHP, but there’s been a lot of discussion on social media around increased interest in PHP by developers who’d usually steer clear of it, largely thanks to Laravel. This post tells the basic story and explains what Laravel brings to the table.

Dave Kiss (Mux)

Building the Same App Using Various Web Frameworks — A scientist at Amazon who usually works in Python with a minimum of JavaScript on the frontend wondered if a more modern web framework would suit him better in 2024. To try this out, he tried Next.js, SvelteKit, and the Python-flavored FastHTML.

Eugene Yan

React and FormData — FormData is ironically both the ‘newest and yet oldest’ standard for accessing form data. Here are some practical ways for using it with TypeScript.

Brad Westfall