#482 — April 3, 2020

Unsubscribe  :  Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

ECMAScript 2020: The Final Feature Set — TC39 has just approved the ECMAScript 2020 spec (a full weekend's bedtime reading right there!) with Ecma GA approval due in a few months, but what’s new? Dr. Axel rounds it up with links to the included stage 4 proposals. If you prefer something more code-driven, Pawel Grzybek has a similar roundup.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

TypeScript 3.9 Beta Released — 3.9’s focus is on “performance, polish, and stability” with the most significant change you’re likely to notice being faster compile times.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Building with Web Components — Web components seek to tilt the balance of web development back towards a standard that has been agreed upon by browser vendors and developers. Explore the history and current state of web components in front-end development.

Heroku sponsor

Perflink: Low Friction JS Benchmarks You Can Share via URL — Version 2 just launched, details here. Tests now run isolated in web workers, ability to save and fork to/from local storage, works cross-browser, and more.

luke jackson

Rendering Charts with OffscreenCanvas — Rendering charts can be an intensive operation for browsers, but what if you could delegate such work to a Web Worker? This post looks at what performance improvements you can realistically expect.

Chris Price

⚡️ Quick Releases

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Senior JavaScript Developer (Warsaw, Relocation Package) — Open source rich text editor used by millions of users around the world. Strong focus on code quality. Join us.

CKEditor

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

ℹ️ If you're interested in running a job listing in JavaScript Weekly, there's more info here.

📘 Articles & Tutorials

A Deep Dive into Pointer Compression in V8 — A very technical post that, gladly, you don’t need to understand in order to enjoy that pointer compression lets the latest version of the V8 JavaScript engine use as much memory as if it were 32 bit while having 64 bit performance.

Igor Sheludko and Santiago Aboy Solanes

Digging Into How An Anti Ad-Blocker Script Works — A developer reverse engineered an ‘ad-blocker blocker’ and picked up some history about ad-blocking on the way.

Hugo Elhaj-Lahsen

Stream Chat API & JavaScript SDK for Custom Chat Apps — Build real-time chat in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure.

Stream sponsor

Getting JavaScript to Talk to CSS and Sass — Despite being bedfellows for years, sharing data between JavaScript and CSS has not always been the simplest task.

Marko Ilic

▶  An Interview with Kyle Simpson — If you’re a fan of Kyle (long time JavaScript luminary and author of You Don’t Know JS (Yet)) you might enjoy this extensive podcast interview with him.

Leanpub Frontmatter podcast

An Introduction to Lambda Calculus, Explained Through JavaScript

Will Taylor

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

▶  How to Sing a Song with the Speech Synthesis API and async/await — A fun little project if you want to play along.

Jad Joubran

JavaScript Logical Operators — Covers ||, &&, and !. Part of Preston’s series on JavaScript fundamentals, so probably not a lot here for advanced devs, but there might be a few tidbits in here for everyone.

Preston Lamb

🔧 Code & Tools

Notyf: A Simple Library for 'Toast' Notifications — ‘Toast’ notifications are those non-modal, unobtrusive notifications you often get in the corner of the screen. Notyf makes them easy to produce in JavaScript too. No dependencies, good accessibility, and responsive. GitHub repo.

Carlos Roso

Rickshaw 1.7: A Toolkit for Creating Interactive Time-Series Graphs — A nice demo page here, complete with code samples. Just been updated for the first time in 2 years. From the folks at Shutterstock, who we use for all of our stock art and graphics :-)

Shutterstock

Trianglify: Algorithmically Generated Triangle Art — At first this sounds a bit like a meaningless experiment but generating such backgrounds can be a great way to bring some flavor to pages and apps.

Quinn Rohlf

Retool: Build Internal Tools a Lot Faster, with Less Maintenance — UI building blocks connect to any DB and API. Hackable by design — use JavaScript anywhere and query JSON with SQL.

Retool sponsor

Plotly.js: A Charting Library Built on D3 and Stack.gl — Amazingly, we last featured Plotly.js 5 years ago when it first launched, and now it has 11K stars but continues to pop out frequent new releases, like this week’s 1.53.0.

Plotly

simdjson 0.3: The Fastest JSON Parser in The World — An open source C++ library (sorry, it’s not JavaScript!) with one goal: parse JSON documents very fast (like 3 gigabytes per second fast.)

Daniel Lemire

Clack: A Modern Keyboard Shortcut Library Written in TypeScript — Looks like a fairly intuitive and simple API and also has a React version.

ReasonInk

TypeScript2Cxx: A TypeScript to C++ Transpilerts2cpp was another project in this vein.

Alex D

A React-Powered HTML5 Raycasting Demo — Very simple visually but it’s interesting how React was used for this. Play with it here.

Andrew X

Bungholio: Get Alerts When Products Become Available on Amazon — Sorry, I just had to include something lighthearted this week, and as a prolific MTV watcher in the 90s, the name got me..

John Titus

📮 Introducing JAMstacked..

It's not often we launch a new newsletter, but JAMstacked is a new email digest from us covering the JavaScript, API, and Markup (i.e. JAMstack) movement. Brian Rinaldi will be the one bringing you a bi-weekly round-up on the evolving JAMstack ecosystem — we've got a couple of issues up now for you to take a look at and get a taste.