What's new for us in ECMAScript 2024

#​698 — July 25, 2024

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Astro 4.12: Say Hello to Server Islands— The flexible Astro framework for building modern content-based sites continues to go from strength to strength. v4.12 includes a new concept of server islands, a way to integrate static HTML and server-side generated components together.

Erika and Phillips (Astro)

What’s New for JavaScript Developers in ECMAScript 2024— High level analysis of developments in the ECMAScript spec, with insights from Ecma vice president Daniel Ehrenberg, TC39 co-chair Rob Palmer, and developer Ashley Claymore. A good, thorough roundup of the state of play.

Mary Branscombe (The New Stack)

💡 If you want to go a step further with what's coming up next, Igalia presents a summary of the recent TC39 meeting in Helsinki with which language proposals were advanced and discussed.

Level Up Your Next.js Skills— Join Scott Moss for this detailed video course on intermediate Next.js. Learn how to build production-ready apps by diving into concepts such as server actions, data fetching, protected routes, form authentication, performance caching, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

A Post Mortem of What Broke Node v22.5.0— Node's ‘Current’release line gives access to the latest Node has to offer, at the risk of encountering troublesome bugs too – v22.5 included two, alas, with Node v22.5.1 quickly following to resolve them.

Yagiz Nizipli et al.

IN BRIEF:

• Rich Harris provides some details about the forthcoming Svelte 5 and shares his opinions on React Server Components (he thinks they're "pretty phenomenal").

• Node.js has added an experimental feature to strip TypeScript types from the code it runs.

• 📊 The results of the State of React 2023 survey have been released including insights from over 13,000 respondents, as have the results of Stack Overflow's 2024 developer survey.

RELEASES:

• Mikro ORM 6.3– Popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript, now with an optional 'schema-first' approach.

• Uppy 4.0– Powerful, modular JavaScript file uploader.

• Preact 10.23– The 3KB React compatible alternative.

• Node.js v20.16.0 (LTS), Storybook 8.2, pnpm 9.6, Meteor.js 3

📒 Articles & Tutorials

So You Think You Know Box Shadows?— The author indulges his creative side with some fun experiments into what he calls “some of the worst possible things” you can do with box shadows on a DIV element, coupled with JavaScript.

David Gerrells

▶  Don't Use JS for That: Moving Features to CSS and HTML— Packed with code and examples. Some techniques aren’t universally supported yet, but there’s a lot that the browser can offer that you don’t need to reimplement yourself, like color picking, modals, and animations.

Kilian Valkhof

😘 Kiss Bugs Goodbye— Get 80% automated E2E test coverage in just 4 months with QA Wolf. With QA cycles complete in minutes (not days), bugs don’t stand a chance. Schedule a demo.

QA Wolf sponsor

How to Choose the Best Rendering Strategy for Your App— The differences between Static Site Generation (SSG), Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Client-Side Rendering (CSR), Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), and Partial Prerendering (PPR).

Alice Alexandra Moore (Vercel)

A Practical Guide to Not Blocking the Event Loop— A look at the core principles of synchronous and asynchronous work in a single-threaded environment, stressing the importance of non-blocking code for efficient event loop utilization.

Slava Knyazev

Why is Spawning a New Process in Node So Slow?— The developers of the Val Town platform noticed that Node couldn’t spawn more than 40 external processes per second, whereas Deno and Bun could do a lot more..

Max McDonnell

Debugging Your Node.js Project with Sentry— Join us live today to learn all the basics to monitoring and debugging your Node.js projects with Sentry.

Sentry sponsor

📺 How to Engineer Your Developer Blog Posts to Have Bigger Impact– From a Postgres community perspective, but the advice is universal and well explained. Claire Giordano

📄 Bring Your Own API Key: Supporting User-Provided OpenAI Keys and Prompts in Browser ExtensionsStephen Siegert

📄 How to Review Code Effectively: A GitHub Staff Engineer’s PhilosophySarah Vessels (GitHub)

📄 How Airbnb Smoothly Upgrades React– It was no small task. Andre Wiggins (Airbnb)

🛠 Code & Tools

Ky: Tiny, Elegant Fetch-Based HTTP Client for Browsers— Makes the Fetch API tidier to use as shown here. If you want to tighten up your fetch calls, it's worth a look.

Sindre Sorhus

React Native Filament: A 3D Rendering Engine for React Native— Fast, native 3D rendering with a React touch. Rendering takes place on a separate thread for efficiency. GitHub repo and pretty good docs, too.

Marc Rousavy

Tests Are Dead. Meticulous Is Here— Automatically creates & maintains e2e UI tests. Zero flakes. Backed by YC, CTO of GitHub, CPO of Adobe, CEO of Vercel.

Meticulous sponsor

Git Granary: A Personal Git LFS Server— A Deno-powered (but can run under Bun and Node) Git Large File Storage (LFS) server implementation written in TypeScript for self-hosted personal use cases.

David Bushell

litegraph.js: A Graph Node Engine and Editor— Useful if you need to create a system for users to create and manipulate graphs or interconnecting ‘nodes’ for things like graphics, audio or data pipelines. Demo.

Javi Agenjo

• 🤖 OpenAI Node v4.53.0– The official Node library for OpenAI's API adds support for their newest gpt-4o-mini model.

• Rollup 4.19– The ES module bundler gains support for decorators.

• eslint-plugin-unicorn 55.0– 100+ useful ESLint rules in one place.

• eslint-plugin-promise 7.0– Enforce best practices for promises.

• pretty-ms 9.1– Convert milliseconds to a human readable string.

• Tinybase 5.1– Powerful reactive data store for local‑first apps.

• MiniSearch 7.1– In-memory fulltext search engine. (Demo.)

• swup 4.7– Page transition library for server-rendered sites.

• Jasmine 5.2– Testing framework for browsers & Node.