Category: javascript

CommonJS, we love you, we love you not..

July 6, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

What’s Next for JavaScript: New Features to Look Forward to — A reassuring and high level look at just what goes into making JavaScript better over time, along with some of the new things about to appear or still making their way through the arduous…

This is a doozy of an issue

June 29, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

A Massive Bug at the Heart of the npm Ecosystem — “This is a doozy,” says the author, who used to work on the npm CLI team. We don’t want to spoil his story too much, but in short, package manifests and actual package contents…

Svelte 4 released

June 22, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

UnsuckJS: Comparing Lightweight JavaScript Options — “No build tools, no compilers, and no hassle.” It’s a table of frontend JavaScript libraries on a simple page – that’s it! But it’s a handy table, letting you see the relative popularity, size, and latest versions of libraries as…

11 years of JavaScript on top

June 15, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Perhaps best known as the creator of Angular, Miško is on a fresh mission with Qwik. Recently reaching v1.0 and focusing on the ‘instant’ delivery of full-stack apps to end users, Qwik takes an interesting approach around ‘streaming’ JavaScript to the client only when needed.…

Douglas Crockford calls JavaScript ‘smelly.’

June 8, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Announcing TypeScript 5.1 — This release of the statically typed JavaScript superset is a gentle ‘quality of life’ step forward rather than a featureful extravaganza, but we get support for linked editing of JSX tag names, namespaced JSX attributes, the ability to have unrelated types…

Bundle-time macros with Bun

June 1, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

JavaScript Macros in Bun — Not content with giving the JavaScript world a brand new bundler, Bun’s Jarred has taken it a bit further: ‘macros’ that run at bundle time with the result being directly inlined into your code. They use stage 3 annotated import…

Microsoft shrunk the TypeScript

May 25, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

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…

jQuery lives on; major changes teased

May 18, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Bun’s New Bundler: 220x Faster than webpack? — Bun is one of the newest JavaScript runtimes (built atop the JavaScriptCore engine) and focuses on speed while aiming to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js. This week’s v0.6.0 release is the ‘biggest release yet’ with standalone…

Why Svelte is converting TypeScript to JSDoc

May 11, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

The JavaScript Ecosystem is Delightfully Weird — There are plenty of examples of how JavaScript is weird but Sam focuses on the why. If you’ve been a JS developer for many years you’ll have seen it go through many phases and morph to fit its…

‘It’s a miracle anything about this ecosystem works at all.’

May 4, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

Psst.. if you’re wondering about the context of today’s subject line, see the first ⚡️ In Brief. Angular v16 Released — With the “biggest release since the initial rollout of Angular”, v16 of the extensive framework introduces a preview of a new signals-based reactivity model (a.k.a. Angular…