#​716 — December 12, 2024

Read on the Web

Together with  Google

JavaScript Weekly

Boa v0.20: An Alternative JavaScript Compiler — Under development for several years, Boa has a few missions: be a Rust ECMAScript implementation, be easy to embed in Rust projects, and be a fast, safe JS engine overall. v0.20 sees a bump up to 89.92% compliance in the Test262 suite, improves Temporal support, adds Atomics.pause, and more. This is no toy engine.

Boa Developers

React v19 Now Stable — First teased in a February 2024 update, React 19 has been in beta for 8 months, so there’s already a wealth of content about it, from the React 19 upgrade guide or an explanation of its compiler to cheat sheets and Vercel’s roundup of what’s new in React 19.

The React Team

Build with Gemini at Lightning Speeds — With the largest context window available, Google Gemini provides JavaScript developers multimodal processing of images, videos and text. Start using Google Gemini in minutes using AI Studio.

Google Gemini sponsor

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

The State of Node.js Performance in 2024 — A thorough set of benchmarks covering recent performance advancements made in Node.js. The improvements between Node 18 and 20 up to version 22 might surprise you - it’s clear the team has put a lot of work into this area.

Gonzaga and Parody (NodeSource)

How to Reduce TTFB? — High "time to first byte" affects web vitals. Learn to identify and fix issues slowing your TTFB.

Sentry sponsor

Publishing a Simple Client-Side JS Package to npm with GitHub Actions — As part of the process of building Prompts.js, a new library for creating simple await-able alternatives to alert(), confirm() and prompt(), Simon wanted to make it easy to publish as an npm package too.

Simon Willison

How to Build a SolidJS App with DenoSolidJS is a declarative library for creating user interfaces that emphasizes fine-grained reactivity and minimal overhead and it plays well with Deno.

Andy Jiang

Get Cooking! Generative AI with MongoDB — See how MongoDB, the world’s most popular document database, integrates with RAG pipelines and cutting-edge AI agents.

MongoDB sponsor

📄 Building Your Own npm create Package – You'll have seen (or used) various scaffolding tools using this technique. (A Different) Alex Chan

📄 What We Learned Migrating From Webpack to Vite Roman Zaynetdinov

📄 Understanding the Browser's Main Thread Amrik Malhans

📺 An Honest Review of TanStack Start vs Next.js Ankita Kulkarni

📄 How React Compiler Performs on Real Code Nadia Makarevich

🛠 Code & Tools

Termo: An Easy to Use Terminal Control for Websites — If you want to offer a terminal emulator style feature on your site (maybe for advanced users, to enhance your docs, or even just as an easter egg), Termo enhances Xterm.js and presents a slick experience.

Raj Nandan Sharma

🖼️ wasm-vips: libvips Image Processing via WebAssemblylibvips is an efficient image processing library written in C. This build offers an isomorphic route to using it in the browser, as well as Node and Deno, all thanks to WebAssembly. (There's an interactive demo here.)

Kleis Auke Wolthuizen

Looking for a DIY Survey Solution? SurveyJS Has You Covered — Build, customize, and store surveys with ease. Total data control, JSON-driven, no backend restrictions—integrates into any JavaScript app.

SurveyJS sponsor

Civet 0.9: Code More with Less Using a TypeScript Superset — Two years old and well maintained, Civet offers an interesting approach. Think JavaScript but with Python style indentation, chained comparisons, built-in JSX, & more. This example alone shows off the potential for tighter, easier-to-write code.

Daniel X Moore and Contributors

Rockpack 5.0: An Alternative React App Starter — A Create React App-style tool aiming to get React project setup time as low as possible, complete with server side rendering support, bundling, linting and testing. GitHub repo.

Alex Sergey

jsesc: Get a Stringified, ASCII-Safe Representation of Any Data — Think JSON.stringify() but instead it returns JavaScript meaning it can support things like maps, sets, and BigInts.

Mathias Bynens

📰 Classifieds

Meticulous automatically creates & maintains E2E UI tests. Zero flakes. Used by Lattice, Bilt Rewards and others.


If your work leans more towards the frontend, be sure to check out the latest issue of Frontend Focus, our sister newsletter focused on all things browser-side.