Turbopack: A Rust-Powered ‘Successor’ to Webpack — With over 3 billion downloads, webpack is the current champion of the bundlers (though Vite has been rapidly advancing). Vercel found it too slow and has funded work on Turbopack. It’s a project to keep an eye on and boasts huge performance boosts over webpack or even Vite, but there are some limitations to take into account:
It’s arguable if it’s a “successor” to webpack, as Turbopack can’t do much of what Webpack can yet, and while they share a creator, webpack is an active project with maintainers of its own.
It’s very connected to React and Next.js 13 (also released this week – more on that next) – Vue and Svelte support is to follow.
The similarly Rust-powered SWC is used to transpile JS/TS.
TLDR: Unless you’re big into Next.js, stick with your existing tools.
Koppers and Palmer (Vercel)
Implement JavaScript Developer Solutions for Every Project — Get dependency-free, fast, flexible, true JavaScript components that enable you to build basic websites, full enterprise applications, Excel-like spreadsheet tools, and reports for your organization. Empower your JavaScript developers today.
GrapeCity
Node 18 Becomes Active LTS with v18.12.0 — Formerly a ‘current’ release getting all the newest features, version 18 (now codenamed Hydrogen) is now the active ‘Long Term Support’ release and will remain so until October 2023.
Ruy Adorno and Rafael Gonzaga
If you’re using an older LTS version and are wondering what Node 18 has to offer, Marian Villa presents 11 Features in Node.js 18 you need to try, including the fetch API, --watch, and the native Node test runner.
“Next.js is the framework for the web the way k8s is the framework for infrastructure” – Kelsey Hightower at Next.js Conf.
RELEASES:
Babel 7.20.0 ↳ The popular transpiler now supports TypeScript 4.9 and Deno as a compilation target.
Which Serverless Edge Platform Has the Fastest Git Deployments? — The team behind Deno have tested some popular serverless edge computing providers (including their own Deno Deploy) to see which has the fastest git deployment time. As always with benchmarks, read the results with a cynical eye and repeat for yourself.
Andy Jiang (Deno)
How to Build a Blog with Fresh and Deno — In other Deno news, if you’ve felt like giving Deno a go for something but been unsure as to what, how about spinning up a simple blog atop the Fresh Web framework? Then deploy it really quickly to Deno Deploy 😉
Andy Jiang (Deno)
▶ A Next.js Crash Course — There are a lot of such videos, but this is a well recorded and up to date one so it might help you get the lay of the Next.js land (which seems to be all the rage this week in particular) if you’re just starting out with it. (2 hours 30 minutes)
Anson Foong
🛠 Code & Tools
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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
Software Engineer (Security) — Join our “kick ass” team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we’re looking for more exceptional engineers to join our Security team. Sticker Mule
