JavaScript Weekly Issue 658: October 12, 2023

#​658 — October 12, 2023

Read on the Web

✍️ Due to being on the road at an event, this is a more compact and bijou issue but I'm back at full pace next week 😅
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Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: The Barrel File Debacle — Marvin continues his tour through the world of JavaScript performance fixes with a look at how some innocent looking code can make tools run slower than they should. Test runners and many import cycle detection tools are most affected.

Marvin Hagemeister

🌊 Building a Water/Fluid Simulation in JavaScript — Hard to explain, but a lot of thought and care has gone into this tutorial of sorts. The live demos are nice, too. Uses p5.js behind the scenes.

Kenichi Yoneda

Strongly Typed and in the ⛅: Meet EdgeDB 4.0 — EdgeDB is an open-source database focused on developer experience. It features a high-level, modern data model, integrated schema migrations, and a TypeScript query builder that makes it easy to write advanced, fast queries, putting ORMs to shame.

EdgeDB sponsor

Angular and Qwik's Creator on How JS Frameworks Handle Reactivity — A summary of Miško Hevery’s keynote from the International JavaScript Conference looking at reactivity across the major frameworks.

Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)

A Web Server ‘Hello World’ Benchmark: Go vs Node vs Nim vs Bun — The standard disclaimer applies: benchmarks are difficult and don’t always measure what you should care about.

Daniel Lemire

• 👀 Simon Willison has put together a fantastic live demo (in notebook format) showing off how to do client-side object detection in images using solely JavaScript and a neural network. (Note: Be aware this uses a lot of CPU and may slow your browser down.)

• ▶️ ViteConf 2023 took place last week and some of the talks are already available on YouTube. 🐦 One key bit of news is about Rolldown, a Rust port of Rollup, meaning Vite will get even faster in the medium term.

• ⚙️ Stephen Röttger of the V8 team has blogged about efforts to enable control-flow integrity (CFI) in V8, essentially a way to reduce the ability of nefarious third parties to exploit V8's control flow in order to trigger arbitrary shellcode.

• ⚠️ A look at the potential dangers of regular expressions in JavaScript.

• 👾 An interesting post mortem of a game built in just 13KB for the JS13K contest.

🎉 RELEASES:

• Electron 27 – The cross-platform desktop app toolkit gains Chromium 118, Node.js 18.17.1, and V8 11.8, but loses macOS 10.13/14 support.

• Fresh 1.5 – A Deno-native framework for building full-stack webapps. v1.5 adds support for partials – the ability to update a portion of an existing page.

• Parcel 2.10 – The zero-config build tool gets some serious performance improvements (7x faster on large projects). Devon Govett wrote 🐦 a Twitter thread explaining how.

• Bun 1.0.5 – Mostly bug fixes and gentle improvements for the performance-oriented JS runtime. No HTTP/2 yet, but it's just around the corner..

• Solid 1.8 – Declarative and performant reactivity for building UIs.

🛠 Code & Tools

Evidence: Reports Synced to Your Data with SQL and Markdown — An open source, code-based alternative to drag-and-drop business intelligence tools. ▶️ This nine minute screencast does a good job at showing off what it can do.

Evidence

Payload 2.0: A Headless CMS Platform Built on Node — A Node-based headless CMS providing an app framework-like experience, including a customizable React-based admin system, GraphQL or REST APIs, flexible auth and file upload systems, etc. v2.0 introduces Postgres support (in addition to MongoDB), Vite support, and a new rich text editor. GitHub repo.

James Mikrut

Add Figma Like Collaborative Features Without Re-Architecting Your App — Create collaborative features, from live cursors to avatar stacks with Spaces, our in-app collaboration SDK.

Ably sponsor

Visual Studio Code Extension Tester v5.10 — A framework for simulating user interactions with VS Code and its extensions via Selenium Webdriver.

Red Hat

audioMotion-analyzer: Real-Time Audio Spectrum Analyzer — A high-resolution real-time audio spectrum analyzer JavaScript module with no dependencies. Gives a single or dual channel view. (Note the AGPL license.) GitHub repo.

Henrique Avila Vianna

• Hotkey 2.1 – Add keyboard shortcuts to pages through HTML attributes (e.g. data-hotkey="Meta+d"). Built by GitHub and used on github.com itself.

• React-Menu 4.1 – Component for building accessible menus and dropdowns.

• Ionic 7.5 – Build cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript.

• pnpm 8.9 – The alternative, efficient package manager.

• Highlight.js 11.9 – Popular JS syntax highlighting library.

• Node.js v18.18.1 (LTS) – To fix a regression in v18.18.0.