🗞 Issue 6 / 19.05.2023


📄 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 executable generation and more, but its new JavaScript bundler and minifier may attract most of the attention and this post digs into why.

JARRED SUMNER


📄 jQuery 3.7.0 Released

JavaScript Weekly is 638 issues old, or almost 13 years once you take away weeks off, so jQuery was a big deal in our early days. We hold a lot of nostalgia for it, and it remains widely used even if no-one is writing about it anymore v3.7 folds the Sizzle selector engine into the core, adds some unitless CSS properties, gains a new uniqueSort method, and “major changes” are still promised in future. jQuery lives on!

TIMMY WILLISON (JQUERY FOUNDATION)


©️JS WEEKLY

️IN BRIEF

📜 TC39's Hemanth.HM has begun keeping a list of ES2023 code examples like he did for ES2022, ES2021, and ES2020.

📜 Promise.withResolvers progressed to stage 2 at the latest TC39 meeting.

📜 The folks at Meta / Facebook have written about the efficiency gains made in Messenger Desktop by moving from Electron to React Native.

📜 One downside to platforms like Cloudflare Workers using V8 isolates has been a lack of support for opening TCP sockets – quite an impediement if you want to talk to a RDBMS over TCP or something. Fear no more, Cloudflare Workers has introduced a connect() API for creating TCP sockets from Workers functions.

RELEASES

Node.js 20.2

Rome 12.1
The formatter/linter gains stage 3 decorator support.

Ember.js 5.0
App framework.

Jasmine 5.0
Testing framework.

Gatsby 5.10
Static site generator built on top of Node.js using React and GraphQL

CODE & TOOLS

🔩VanJS: A 1.2KB Reactive UI Framework Without JSX

A new entrant to an increasingly crowded space, VanJS is particularly light and elegant, and its author has put some serious effort into documenting it and offering tools to convert your HTML to its custom format. It’s short for vanilla JavaScript, by the way.. GitHub repo.

TAO XIN


🔩 Starry Night: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting

Apparently, GitHub’s own syntax highlighting approach isn’t open source, but this takes a similar approach and is. It’s admittedly quite 'heavy' (due to using a WASM build of the Oniguruma regex engine) but that’s the price of quality.

TITUS WORMER


🔩 eslint-plugin-check-file: Rules for Consistent Filename and Folder Names

Allows you to enforce a consistent naming pattern for file and directory names in projects.

HUAN

🔥js2flowchart.js

A visualization library to convert JavaScript code into attractive SVG flowcharts. Luckily, there’s a live online version if you want to play without having to install anything.

BOHDAN LIASHENKO

All explanations 👉 here

🗞 Issue 7 / 24.05.2023


📄 The State of Node.js Performance in 2023

Nearform’s Rafael Gonzaga reflects on the recent release of Node 20 and puts it through its paces against v18.16 and v16.20 with a few different benchmark suites running on a pretty typical EC2 instance. He goes into a lot of depth that’s worth checking out, but if you haven’t got time: “Node 20 is faster.” 😁

RAFAEL GONZAGA


📄 Bun v0.6.0: Upping Its Node.js Compatibility Game

A ‘biggest release yet’ of the popular alternative JS runtime adds a built-in bundler and minifier, standalone executable generation, and more enhancements to its Node.js compatibility (something Bun boasts as a feature as a ‘drop-in replacement’, as opposed to Deno where it’s more of a late addition).

JARRED SUMNER

©️NODE.JS WEEKLY