How V8 continues to get faster

#526 — February 19, 2021

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JavaScript Weekly

Announcing Vite 2.0— Vite is a build tool aimed at giving you a faster development experience by providing a dev server with hot module replacement support, and Rollup- and esbuild-powered bundling and building.

Evan You

V8's Super Fast super Property Access— The first of two articles this week about how the V8 team are somehow making the already fast V8 JavaScript engine even faster for us. Using super, till now, was an unoptimized and slightly costly operation but now it’s almost on par with accessing normal properties.

Marja Hölttä (V8)

Frontity: Bringing React to WordPress— Frontity Framework connects with WordPress seamlessly so you can focus on building your React front-end, without worrying about tooling and configuration. Its ease of use and extensibility make it a favorite when working with headless WordPress.

Frontity sponsor

An Interview with Ryan Dahl, the Creator of Node.js and Deno— Ryan created Node.js 11 years ago and in recent years has moved on to Deno where he’s attempting a new take at the same idea. This interview touches on Deno’s challenges and Ryan’s love of Rust and Vim.

Evrone

V8's Route to Faster JavaScript Method Calls— This gets very technical and fast, but it’s yet more of a look behind what the V8 team is up to. This work improves the performance of your Node and browser-facing code alike.

Victor Gomes

Opal 1.1: A Ruby to JavaScript Compiler— An interesting way to take Ruby code to the frontend by simply translating it into JavaScript. It’s been around for years but 1.1.0 is the first significant release in some time.

Adam Beynon and Contributors

Quick Bits

• NASA used Three.js to render a real-time simulation of this week's NASA rover landing on Mars 🚀
• The date-fns documentation site lets you play with the library in the browser console in a cute way and here's the code that makes it work.
• One of the Angular core team has written about how Angular strongly encourages best practices and the next natural step is for Angular 12 to enable 'strict mode' by default.
• Node.js has some security releases coming out next week– one of the security issues involved is of 'critical' severity. We will share these in next week's issue of Node Weekly.
• esbuild now supports Apple's M1 chip natively and is even faster.
• The Colyseus open source Node-powered multiplayer game engine has been 'acquired' by Lucid Sight, a developer of popular licensed mobile games.

💻 Jobs

Senior/Lead React Developer (Remote)— Join our talented team - thinking big, building world-class restaurant and guest experience management products.

Eat App

Senior Web Developer (Node/ReactJS) - Remote— Millions get inspired and plan adventures with our apps. To help us make komoot.com the place to go to plan outdoor adventures, we’re looking for a one of a kind Web Developer to join our team.

Komoot

Find Your Next Job Through Hired— Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Hired

📖 Articles, Opinion & Tutorials

How to 'Listify' a JavaScript Array— There’s a little more to making a human readable list from an array in JavaScript than you might think. There’s a bonus TypeScript version too.

Kent C Dodds

Avoiding npm Substitution Attacks— Recently there have been some high profile examples of supply chain attacks, such as where fake or eponymous packages are published, but you can reduce your attack surface by taking precautions and managing dependencies.

Isaac Z. Schlueter

Introducing SPOTcon 2021! Get Your Free Early Bird Ticket Today— Scout APM's digital event on performance and observability. Register before 2/28 and we'll donate $5 to OSS when you attend.

Scout APM sponsor

Learn Snowpack: A High-Performance Frontend Build Tool— We’ve mentioned Snowpack a lot in the past year but it’s nice to see a third party introduction and tutorial.

Jack Franklin

How to Publish an Angular, React, Svelte, or Vue App with Azure Static Web Apps— A multi-step tutorial on deploying a modern JavaScript app to Azure Static Web Apps, Azure’s platform for building and deploying static apps from a GitHub repository.

John Papa (Microsoft)

Serverless TypeScript: A Complete Setup for AWS SAM Lambdas— A workflow for creating TypeScript-based AWS Lambda functions with AWS SAM that support testing, debugging, etc. and using shared layers to package dependencies.

Andrey Novikov and Sergey Alexandrovich

The Ultimate Guide to Cardinality for Observability

Lightstep sponsor

How to Use WebSockets With Your Vue.js Projects— Not a tutorial but two blobs of code to show you how a basic Vue.js frontend and a Node backend can communicate with WebSockets.

Mastering JS

Web Frameworks: Why You Don't Always Need Them
Richard MacManus

How to Create a Shrinking Header on Scroll without JavaScript
Håvard Brynjulfsen

a11y-dialog: Accessible, Lightweight Dialog Windows— It can lean on the native dialog element, if you like, has WAI-ARIA support, and there’s a demo here. I like it.

Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel

Metascraper: A Library to Scrape Metadata from Web Content— It uses things like Open Graph annotations, JSON+LD, and HTML metadata to get you things like author, title, description, and even an image related to the URLs of your choice.

Microlink

fullPage.js: Create Fullscreen Scrolling Sites— Available in Vue, React, and Angular flavors too. (GPL 3.0 licensed.) GitHub repo.

Álvaro Trigo

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future— 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Neutralino 1.8: Portable, Lightweight Desktop App Framework— Think something like Electron but rather than including a Chromium distribution with every app, it uses the platform’s built-in Web view component. Due to this, Neutralino boasts low memory use and small distribution size for apps. GitHub repo.

Codezri

ExcellentExport.js: Export Table Data to Excel or CSV— If your app/page has some data in HTML tables and you’d like to export it to CSV or XLSX without any server involvement, this could help.

Jordi Burgos

OrgChart: A jQuery Plugin for Rendering Org Charts— It’s not often we get to link to jQuery plugins anymore(!) but this is one that’s kept up to date. There are Vue, Angular, and React versions too but less frequently updated. Examples of output.

Xuebin Dong

fast-check: Property Based Testing for JavaScript and TypeScript

Nicolas Dubien

disableautofill.js: Disable Form Auto-Fill and Auto-Complete Functions— You need to be very careful about where you use things like this due to effect on assistive tools.

Terry Lin

SVGJAR: An Easy Way to Add SVG Images to Ember Apps

Ivan Votti