Reverse engineering minified JS with ChatGPT

#​703 — September 5, 2024

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

An SSR Performance Showdown— Fastify’s Matteo Collina set out to find the current state of server-side rendering performance across today’s most popular libraries. The first attempt faced negative feedback due to implementation issues, but the showdown has been improved and re-run.

Matteo Collina

Announcing Vue 3.5— While v3.5 is a minor release, it’s one Vue users will love, with big performance and memory usage improvements in its reactivity system. With no breaking changes, upgrade and watch memory consumption drop.

Evan You

WorkOS: The Modern Identity Platform for B2B SaaS— WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible and easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and RBAC in minutes instead of months. It's trusted by hundreds of high-growth startups such as Perplexity, Vercel, Drata, and Webflow.

WorkOS sponsor

Reverse Engineering Minified JavaScript with ChatGPT— Writing new code with AI is one thing, but could it be even better at understanding existing code that you’re struggling to grok? Yes, it seems.

Frank Fiegel

Inside ECMAScript: JavaScript Standards Get an Extra Stage— After nine years of annual updates, TC39 has tweaked the process to make rolling out new features faster and smoother. The so-called ‘Stage 2.7’ has been around for a while, but this is a neat primer to what it represents.

Mary Branscombe (The New Stack)

IN BRIEF:

• ⭐ Vercel goes deep into what's new in React 19.

• 💰 Alpine.js creator Caleb Porzio shares his tale of passing $1m on GitHub Sponsors.

• Bye NgModules, the future of Angular is standalone! Angular v19 will make standalone: true the default for components, directives, and pipes. This is already the recommended best practice, however.

• Angular's product lead, Minko Gechev, has also shared a little about what it means to mange the Angular project.

• OpenAI has switched ChatGPT from Next.js to a Remix-based app, according to Remix's Ryan Florence on X.

• 🇵🇱 Poland's WarsawJS community is holding a 10th anniversary meetup on September 11. They invite you to ▶️ watch live on YouTube.

• 🤖 Lee Robinson shows off ▶️ the latest enhancements to Vercel's v0, an AI-based tool for creating apps and components from prompts you supply.

[Workshop] Fix Your Front-End: JavaScript Edition— Learn practical tips to make debugging more tolerable. Join our JavaScript team live for a masterclass on Sept 24.

Sentry sponsor

RELEASES:

• Node.js v22.8.0 (Current)– Adds a new API for enabling on-disk code caching at runtime, as well as options to set thresholds for code coverage success.

• Astro 4.15– The popular content site framework stabilizes Astro Actions, a solution for fully type-safe backend functions.

• Jimp 1.3– Pure JS image processing library for Node.

• Turborepo 2.1, Puppeteer 23.3, Mermaid 11.1

📒 Articles & Tutorials

▶  Behind the Scenes: The Making of VS Code— A detailed conversation with two of the popular editor's principal engineers on what makes it tick. VS Code is surely one of the world's most widely distributed JavaScript-powered apps.

Holland, Rieken and Pasero (Microsoft)

How I Created a 3.78MB Docker Image for a JavaScript Service— The smallest JavaScript app container images tend to run into tens of megabytes, but tailoring your app to run on a lighter runtime like llrt can yield striking results.

Shenzilong

Leave Forms to SurveyJS and Get Back to What You Love Coding— Extensible JavaScript libraries for form management. Drag-and-drop UI, JSON form definitions, and seamless integration with any backend for full data control.

SurveyJS sponsor

Exploring Goja: A Go-Powered JavaScript Runtime— Goja is a pure Go(lang) JS runtime that makes it possible to embed JS into Go apps.

JT Archie

How to Use React Compiler— The compiler feature in React 19 is generating a lot of buzz — this “complete guide”, as described by this author, covers much of what you'll need to get started.

Tapas Adhikary

Multithreaded Programming in Node.js using Atomics— Worker threads enable you to write multi-threaded Node apps, but sharing resources across them can quickly become tricky. Atomics can help avoid some of the pain.

Pavel Romanov

📄 A Complete Guide to Beginning with JavaScript– A rather epic article packed with background knowledge, context, and third party resources for starting a modern JavaScript learning journey. Cody Lindley

📄 Implementing Filtered Semantic Search Using pgvector and JavaScriptTeam Timescale

📄 How to Quickly (and Weightlessly) Convert Chrome Extensions to SafariNina Torgunakova (Evil Martians)

📄 How Sentry Uses Mutation Testing on its JavaScript SDKsLukas Stracke (Sentry)

🎤 Talking Deno 2 with Ryan DahlSyntax․fm Podcast

🛠 Code & Tools

jsdiff 6.0: A JavaScript Text Diffing Implementation— Can compare strings for differences in various ways including creating patches. There’s an online demo. (Don't worry – we're not going monthly ;-))

Kevin Decker

Redwood v8.0 Released— A long standing, opinionated React & GraphQL (and/or RSC) full-stack framework that covers all the bases for professional dev teams with best-in-class tool support. v8.0 introduces a background jobs system, Docker support, and easier SSR and RSC setup.

Redwood Team

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

🇬🇧 GOV.UK Vue 1.0: Build Vue Apps, the British Way— The UK government is known for having an effective, well-designed site where Brits can complete various official tasks. Now you can get all of their components in Vue 3 form.

UK Government

👀 style-observer: A Mutation Observer for CSS— Attach JavaScript callbacks to changes in computed values of CSS properties.

Bramus Van Damme

Goxygen: Quickly Generate a Go Backend for a JS Project— A tool that sets up a new Go-based project with Angular, React, or Vue in the front-end, and Docker and Docker Compose files to make it all work.

Sasha Shpota

Typist 7.0: Tiptap-Based Rich Text Editor Component— Simple and opinionated. You can try several examples in the sidebar. Well suited for basic rich text situations like writing comments or messages and has a single-line mode.

Doist

Belt: A New Tool for Starting React Native Apps— A CLI tool for starting a new React Native app that takes various mundane decisions away from you and uses tooling and conventions established by a productive app development team.

Thoughtbot

• Tinybase 5.2– Powerful reactive data store for local‑first apps. Now with Postgres support (which can even work in-browser!)

• jsdoc-to-markdown 9.0– Generate Markdown docs from JSDoc-annotated code.

• LogTape 0.5– No-dependency logging lib for Deno, Node, Bun & browsers.

• Plasmo 0.89– Imagine Next.js but for building browser extensions.

• JsonTree.js 3.0– Customizable tree views for JSON data.

• Poku 2.6– Cross-platform JavaScript test runner.

• Faker 9.0– Generate large amounts of fake data.