Microsoft spills the tea on TypeScript

September 21, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

▶ TypeScript Origins: The Documentary — You know you’ve made it when you get your own documentary! This has just dropped but is well produced, packed with stories from TypeScript’s co-creators, users, and other folks at Microsoft, and kept me entertained. It goes particularly deep into the motivations and process behind TypeScript’s creation, including why Microsoft felt it was worth pursuing at all.

OfferZen Origins

🔥 The takes get spicer 25+ minutes in as various TypeScript users chip in with their opinions, and even Daniel Rosenwasser, now program manager of the TypeScript team, says he initially worried that Microsoft might “f**k it all up.” 😅 Ryan Dahl pops up about an hour in too.. so I hope you’ve got some time spare.

Patterns for Reactivity with Modern Vanilla JavaScript — When data changes, you often want to do things, and the process that makes that happen is reactivity. While many libraries or frameworks like React or Vue offer reactive solutions out of the box, you can do it all with vanilla JavaScript too, and this post digs into many of the patterns you might need to use, complete with examples.

Marc Grabanski

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Hiroki Osame

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

The Svelte team offers a sneak peek at the forthcoming Svelte 5 and introduces the idea of ‘runes’: “Like every other framework, we’ve come to the realisation that Knockout was right all along.”
Happy 27th birthday to JScript! JScript was a version of JavaScript that Microsoft put into IE 3.0 primarily to avoid trademark issues around the name of JavaScript. No-one cares much about that anymore, despite Oracle still technically holding the JavaScript trademark.
Folks are discussing whether Node.js needs a mascot of its own.
Want to support anyone doing great work on JavaScript projects? You can nominate them for a GitHub Star.
If you rely upon the npm package download counts at all, the daily counts for all packages was zero on September 13 and 14 (example). Why? “This issue remains under investigation,” says npm support.

🎉 RELEASES:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

🧭 What’s New in Safari 17 — Safari 17 is now in beta on iOS 17 with the final release dropping across all of Apple’s platforms next week. On the JavaScript front, Safari and WebKit now fully support the Storage API, WebGL in Offscreen Canvas, v flag support on regexes, Set operation methods, URL.canParse, plus the much anticipated support for PWAs in macOS Sonoma.

Jen Simmons and the WebKit team

🛠 Code & Tools

fx 30: The Go(lang)-Powered Terminal JSON Viewer — Yes, it’s written in Go, but fx has long been a useful tool for looking at JSON files, and it has just been rewritten from the ground up with a new look, regex search, fuzzy search, and support for “even the most massive JSON files.” You don’t need to worry about Go at all; it’s simply a fantastic tool for looking at JSON.

Anton Medvedev

Mantine 7.0: The Popular React Component Library — A big release for what is now one of the most popular React component libraries. As of v7, Mantine no longer relies on Emotion and components come with native CSS files, all components now support the system-set color scheme, CSS modules are now the default way to style components, and there are many smaller enhancements too.

Mantine Team

Chrono 2.7: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Wanasit Tanakitrungruang

Theatre.js 0.7: Motion Design for the Web — Can be used both programmatically or via a visual editor to animate objects created with things like Three.js, React Three Fiber, HTML/SVG, or even just tween variable values.

Theatre.js Project

💡 Chrome Extension CLI is another option in this space.

Nest.js Back-End Developer — Lead the development of a HealthTech platform, focused on Caregiver support. TypeScript, Nest.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, React/Next.js.
Carallel

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

“The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.”

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Melinda Varian