Can you understand this JavaScript?

March 14, 2025 By Mark Otto Off

A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle — It looks deceptively simple – just 14 characters of JavaScript – but after working with JavaScript for 29 years, I got it wrong. A clue: it goes back to a browser-related quirk from 30 years ago..

Hillel Wayne

TypeScript’s Compiler to Get 10x Faster — TypeScript has shaken up the JavaScript ecosystem in recent years with an increasing number of developers relying on its strong typing and added structure. TypeScript’s compiler isn’t particularly fast, though, but the TypeScript team at Microsoft are changing that by porting it to Go!

Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft)

💡 Dr. Axel Rauschmayer takes a closer look at the details behind the port.

Build a Secure Project Management — Learn a security-first approach to building web applications by building a secure project management platform with Next.js.

Clerk

IN BRIEF:

Node.js v20.19.0 (LTS) is a notable release for a maintenance branch of Node as an exception has been made to the maintenance policy for backporting require(esm) support, which is now enabled by default.
The latest version of Chrome (and preview versions of Firefox and Safari) support two new HTML attributes, command and commandfor, for adding declarative actions to HTML buttons without directly requiring JavaScript.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Building APIs with Next.js — A detailed, official introduction to the concepts behind using Next.js’ App Router and route handlers to build public APIs you can expose to web, mobile, and third-party clients.

Lee Robinson

🛠 Code & Tools

🔎 Node Modules Inspector — A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, “installs” a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty’s Zach Leatherman did here.

Anthony Fu

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly — PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it’s only a few megabytes in size.

ElectricSQL / Neon

Gleam 1.9 – Type-safe functional programming language that targets both the Erlang VM and JavaScript runtime.
<css-doodle> 0.42 – Web component for drawing patterns with CSS.
Faker 9.6 – Generate fabricated data to your heart’s content.
Choices 11.1 – Configurable select box/text input plugin.
🕒 Spacetime 7.8 – Lightweight timezone library.
Ink 5.2 – Use React to build CLI apps.