June 25, 2024

Subject: ES2024 book; State of JS results; improving ESM; web build tool “Farm”; optimizing JS; property-based testing; Web Engines Hackfest videos; Biome v1.8.0; Rspack v0.7.4; Bun v1.1.14

Out now: “Exploring JavaScript (ES2024 Edition)”

exploringjs.com @rauschma@fosstodon.org

“Exploring JavaScript” is the new name of the book “JavaScript for impatient programmers”. Its latest edition is out now and free to read online: Learn everything you need to know about ECMAScript 2024.

State of JavaScript 2023: the results are in

2023.stateofjs.com @sachagreif@hachyderm.io

5 ways JavaScript is improving modules for developers

thenewstack.io @marypcbuk@hachyderm.io @TheNewStack@hachyderm.io

The upcoming “module harmony” proposals for ECMAScript enable the following improvements:
  • Combining module files with Web Workers
  • Module declarations
  • Import attributes
  • Granular security with Compartments
  • Making life easier for dev tools like Jest

Farm: web build tool written in Rust

www.farmfe.org github.com/farm-fe

Highlights:
  • Built-in support for: HTML, CSS, CSS Modules, JS/JSX, TS/TSX, JSON, static assets
  • Supported via official plugins: Sass, Less, PostCSS, Vue, React, Solid
  • Support for Vite plugins
  • Partial bundling

Tips for optimizing JavaScript

romgrk.com github.com/romgrk

“I often feel like JavaScript code in general runs much slower than it could, simply because it’s not optimized properly. Here is a summary of common optimization techniques I’ve found useful. Note that the tradeoff for performance is often readability, so the question of when to go for performance versus readability is a question left to the reader.”

Hands-on guide to property-based testing in JavaScript

www.webdevlog.com github.com/yaircohendev

“Property-based testing allows you to generate thousands of variations in data and test your code against them. Learn how to start doing property-based testing in JavaScript with fast-check.”

What is your preferred JavaScript bundler?

Results from our recent newsletter poll (430 participants).
Poll Results: What is your preferred JavaScript bundler? - 430 participants

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Now online: video recordings from Web Engines Hackfest 2024

www.youtube.com @webhackfest@floss.social

Videos:
  • The Future of Source Maps (Jonathan Kuperman)
  • Firefox Wayland post mortem (Martin Stransky)
  • The journey towards stabilizing Chromium’s Wayland support (Antonio Gomes & Max Ihlenfeldt)
  • Nova JavaScript Engine – Exploring a Data-Oriented Engine Design (Aapo Alasuutari)
  • Sustainable Futures: Funding the Web Ecosystem (Stephanie Stimac)
  • History of WebGPU in Deno (Leo Kettmeir)
  • Blitz: a truly modular, hackable web renderer (Nico Burns)
  • Status of the Layer-Based SVG Engine in WebKit (Nikolas Zimmermann)

New versions

Biome v1.8.0: support for CSS and more

github.com @biomejs@fosstodon.org

Highlights:
  • Support for CSS formatting and linting (both opt-in)
  • Support for LSP Workspaces
  • New reporters: Summary, JSON, GitHub and JUnit

Rspack v0.7.4: CSS minimizer and more

github.com github.com/LingyuCoder github.com/web-infra-dev

“In v0.7.4 Rspack provides a new CSS minimizer which uses Lightning CSS under the hood, for now you can enable it by optimization.minimizer, and in Rspack v1.0, it will be enabled by default.”

Bun v1.1.14: patching dependencies, ORM-less object mapping, and more

bun.sh github.com/paperdave github.com/oven-sh

Highlights:
  • “bun patch makes it easy to modify dependencies without forking or vendoring. Changes persist into a .patch file which can be reviewed, shared, versioned, and reused in other projects. These .patch files are automatically applied on bun install, with the results cached in Bun's Global Cache.”
  • ORM-less object mapping for bun:sqlite
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