#641 — June 1, 2023
JavaScript Weekly
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 statements (so may become regular JS eventually) and Jarred shows off some use cases here.
Jarred Sumner
▶ Discussing the Future of React with Two Core Team Members — As part of the celebrations around React’s 10th birthday, Vercel’s Delba de Oliveira interviewed Andrew Clark and Sebastian Markbåge of the React core team on modern topics including server components, Suspense, Actions, and the next steps React will take.
Delba de Oliveira (Vercel)
URL Validation 101 — with Snyk — Keep script injection and server side request forgery out of your JavaScript applications with Snyk.
Snyk sponsor
Aimless.js: The ‘Missing’ JavaScript Randomness Library — If you’ve been itching for functions to give you random characters, numbers from custom distributions, random sequences, random items, weighted random numbers, or more, this is for you.
Christopher Cavalea
⚡️ IN BRIEF:
🎂 Two big birthdays in the past week: Node.js turned 14 and React turned 10.
Intel and Google have been working together on the Compute Pressure API which you can use, in origin trial, in Chrome 115. It provides a way to measure the ‘computational strain’ of the system your code is running on to then adjust how your app operates accordingly.
🎤 Misko Hevery, creator of Angular and now Qwik, was on the Stack Overflow Podcast talking about ▶️ how he’s ‘dehydrating the Web’ in an ongoing quest for higher performance.
‘Deferring Module Evaluation’ is a TC39 proposal for basically being able to lazily load modules which are executed only upon use.
You can now use Node.js built-in modules on Deno Deploy, making it easier to run existing JS apps ‘at the edge’ on their platform.
Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub co-founder and Redwood co-creator, writes about how Redwood is going ‘all in on React Server Components’ and announces the first Redwood conference this September.
SupportsCSS: Feature Detection for Modern CSS — Inspired by Modernizr, this script expands on the capabilities of CSS’s @supports feature by adding classes to your HTML and exposing a results object so you can run custom tests live in the browser.
Stephanie Eckles
📅 JSDayIE 2023: The First JavaScript Conference in Ireland Is Back! — Join us on September 26th in Dublin to experience everything the Irish JavaScript community and Ireland have to offer.
JSDayIE sponsor
RELEASES:
Electron 25 – Now offering a Chrome-powered net.fetch (as opposed to Node’s flavor of fetch()).
Neutralinojs 4.12 – Desktop app dev framework.
📒 Articles & Tutorials
How to Draw Any Regular Shape with Just One JavaScript Function — Mozilla/MDN has a (relatively) new blog — here they share how to use JavaScript to draw any regular shape to a HTML canvas with a single function, and how to modify it to draw multiple shapes.
Ruth John
Sharing WebSocket Connections between Tabs and Windows — If your users open your app in multiple tabs or windows, being able to share a WebSocket connection could be a lot more efficient both at the client and server end. Is it possible? With SharedWorkers (supported by all major browsers, except Chrome on Android), you can.
Szymon Chmal
▶ How React Works Under The Hood: 2023 Edition — Quite a lot of depth for a mere 13-minutes. Covers React broadly, along with the pros and cons of JSX, how the virtual DOM approach works, plus React’s diffing algorithm.
FrontStart
Connected APM and Infrastructure Monitoring at Up to 1/3rd the Cost of Datadog
New Relic sponsor
Why Does a Farmer Emoji Have a Length of 7 in JS? — This is a nicely accessible introduction to a topic that often causes confusion. Get ready to learn a little about grapheme clusters, scalars, and code units.
Evan Hahn
The Evolution of React APIs and Code Reuse — An exploration of common React patterns, from mixins and higher-order components to render props & hooks.
Rem / Frontend Mastery
▶ ‘I Tried 8 Different Postgres ORMs’ — A modern, fast-paced, and slightly irreverent look at working with Postgres from back-end JavaScript runtimes. (9 minutes.)
Beyond Fireship
Automatically Unsubscribe from RxJS Observables in Angular Components
Rob Bell
Deploying Vanilla Node.js Apps on Fly.io
Sam Ruby (Fly)
Asynchronous JavaScript for Beginners
Daniel Agantem
🛠 Code & Tools
Svelvet: A Svelte Component Library for Interactive Node-Based Diagrams — You can create flow diagrams using pre-built components with seamless zooming and panning, draggable interactivity, customizable edges/nodes, etc.
Svelvet Team
Inkline 4.0: A Customizable Vue.js 3 UI/UX Library — A design system and numerous customizable components designed for mobile-first (but desktop friendly) and built with accessibility in mind.
Alex Grozav
Handsontable: Data Editor for React — There’s a lot of JS data grids out there, but none quite like Handsontable: Excel-like design, keyboard shortcuts, and React support make it the perfect data editor for web apps.
Handsontable Data Grid sponsor
JECS: An Entity Component System (ECS) for JS — Entity component systems are common in game development as they provide a lot of flexibility for managing the many objects present in games.
Stuhl
Color Names: A Gigantic List of Handpicked Color Names — At first, I thought this was just going to be a hundred or so obvious choices like the named colors in HTML (💜 rebeccapurple) but it’s actually over 30,000 colors with a fantastic array of names and uses, plus JavaScript functions to work with them.
David Aerne
fastgron: High-Performance JSON to GRON Converter — ‘gron’ is a transpiled form of JSON into individual assignment operations which makes it easier to grep. (fastgron is itself written in C++.)
Adam Ritter
Orama 1.0.3
↳ In-memory, typo-tolerant, text search engine.
Perspective 2.2
↳ WASM-powered high-perf data visualization component.
Javet 2.2 – Java + V8. Embed JS into Java.
OverlayScrollbars 2.2 – JS custom scrollbar plugin.
html-react-parser 4.0 – HTML to React parser.
Vuetify 3.3.2 – Vue component framework.
💻 Jobs
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
🧑💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.
🎥 Live-streaming from JavaScript
JSFiddle: Did You Know You Can Stream on Twitch from JavaScript? — This is an interesting experiment, but I tried it and it worked! Twitch added support for WebRTC ingestion a while ago and this CodePen example ties that together with fewer than 50 lines of JavaScript to send your preferred video source to the popular livestreaming service. It’s hardly OBS, but I imagine someone will rustle up something fancier with this approach in time.
Sean DuBois on JSFiddle