#643 — June 15, 2023

✍️ Be sure to make it to the end of today's issue because we have an interview with the creator of Angular and Qwik, Miško Hevery, about exactly what Qwik brings to the modern JavaScript development table. Spoiler: performance and resumability.
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

Together with

Val Town: If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun — I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a few months and it’s a fascinating idea rapidly turning into a useful service that's going places. You write bite size chunks of JavaScript and Val Town runs them in a sandbox, lets them call each other, lets you schedule them, or serves them up over HTTP. It’s smart and worth a look.

Steve Krouse

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023 Results — Over 90,000 developers took Stack Overflow’s annual survey and it’s all "coming up Milhouse" ▶️ for JavaScript (and TypeScript too, natch) with JS topping the popularity charts 11 years in a row. Its showing is somewhat poorer in the top paying technologies list, but we can’t have it all.

Stack Overflow

Enterprise UI Development: Testing & Code Quality — Managing or migrating large apps and codebases? This video course covers what you need to know to scale efficiently whilst maintaining code quality. Covers unit testing, CI pipelines, mocking, code coverage, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Melange 1.0: Compile OCaml / ReasonML to JavaScript — Having started life as a fork of BuckleScript, Melange now pitches itself as a mature tool for compiling OCaml (a popular functional programming language) to efficient and readable JavaScript.

Antonio Nuno Monteiro, Hongbo Zhang et al.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

Chrome for Testing is a new, official Chrome 'flavor' specifically targeting web testing and automation use cases. You can already use it with Puppeteer.
Angular's ng-conf event is currently taking place, and the latest news is the release of Angular 16.1 (now with TypeScript 5.1 support), an RFC for a new control flow syntax, and an RFC for built-in declarative lazy loading.
Allegedly, you can't currently publish npm packages containing the words 'keygen' or 'cheat' in their names. Hacker News has been discussing it and a response from npm is currently being awaited.
Terence Eden has come up with a way to password protect a static HTML page with no JavaScript but it's such an odd approach that you might not want to use it in production 😆

RELEASES:

Node.js v20.3.0 (Current)
VS Code May 2023 Edition – Adds a JS refactoring to move a class, function, or constant into an existing file and update all references.
Bun 0.6.9 – Mostly fixes and memory efficiencies for the alternative JS runtime. Nice.
TS-Pattern 5.0
↳ Exhaustive pattern matching library for TypeScript.
NestJS 10.0 – Progressive Node.js app framework. (What's new.)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

An Introduction to Debugging Tools and Approaches for Node — An informative primer on debugging, from simple things like using IDE extensions to highlight potential problems or, yes, console logging, through to using the V8 inspector and debugging via Chrome.

Craig Buckler

Before Your Next Frontend Pull Request, Use This Checklist — Avoid common mistakes in pull requests with this checklist, covering areas from minimizing bundle size and ensuring accessibility to using semantic markup and keeping code clean.

Nina Torgunakova

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, karma, jasmine, and more.

Wallaby.js sponsor

▶ Nuxt Explained in 100 Seconds — One of Fireship’s typical fast-paced high level roundups. This time they cover Nuxt, the Vue-oriented app framework.

Fireship

How To Build Server-Side Rendered (SSR) Svelte Apps with SvelteKit — SvelteKit is a framework for building apps using Svelte. This post walks through creating a simple job board with it and deploying on Netlify.

Sriram Thiagarajan

▶ Learn Angular Routing in 35 Minutes
Ervis Trupja

🛠 Code & Tools

Motion Canvas: A TypeScript Library and Real-Time Preview Editor to Program Animations — Uses generator functions to procedurally define your animations, and you can try out the web-based editor that allows you to work with the animations visually.

Motion Canvas

Code Together Before You Work Together. Interview Devs in a Real IDE — Skip algorithm interviews & use CoderPad to run coding interviews that are trusted by both candidates and interviewers.

CoderPad sponsor

Threlte: A Three.js Scene Renderer and Component Library for Svelte — react-three-fiber is great, but if you prefer Svelte, this is the alternative for you. It appears to be under very active development too with a whole new version on the way soon. GitHub repo.

Grischa Erbe

Million.js: A Performance-Focused VDOM Replacement for React — Starting life two years ago as a small, library-agnostic virtual DOM implementation, Million has recently presented itself as a performance enhancement for React: “Imagine React components running at the speed of raw JavaScript.”

Aiden Bai

📰 We featured this in this week's React Status newsletter – if you're a React developer, we focus more heavily on React news there.

jest-extended 4.0: Additional Matchers for Jest Users — If you’re using Jest for testing, this project introduces a variety of more specific matchers for various situations, particularly around type, value and format checking.

Jest Community

Rewind-UI: Customizable React + Tailwind CSS Component Library — A React component library fitting into the Tailwind CSS way of thinking. You can play with a live demo of some basic customizations on the homepage. It’s in beta but there are about thirty components to sink your teeth into.

Nick Dunas

React Authentication — Without Complexity

Userfront sponsor

⏱🌎 tz-lookup 8.0: Fast Time Zone Estimations from Latitude and Longitude — “This package trades speed and size for accuracy.” If you need to quickly infer timezone from location in Node or the browser, it's worth a try.

Matthew McEachen

SVG.js v3.2: SVG Manipulation and Animation Library — A lightweight approach without dependencies. There’s a demo on JSFiddle you can play with. GitHub repo.

Various Authors

Vue-ECharts 6.6
↳ Apache ECharts component for Vue.js. (Demo.)
Neutralino.js 4.12.0 – JS desktop app framework.
Mineflayer 4.9 – Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.
Tremor 3.1 – React dashboard building library.
♖ React Chessboard 3.0 – Yes, a chess component!
React Calendar 4.3

Dehydrating the Web with...
Miško Hevery

Perhaps best known as the creator of Angular, Miško is on a fresh mission with Qwik. Recently reaching v1.0 and focusing on the 'instant' delivery of full-stack apps to end users, Qwik takes an interesting approach around 'streaming' JavaScript to the client only when needed.

Miško recently shared the full story of Qwik ▶️ on the Stack Overflow podcast, and we wanted to ask him a few questions here too:

What was the key inspiration behind Qwik?

I don't think there was a "key" inspiration but an accumulation of things that made me realize the current approach doesn't scale.

We did a lot of work making the Ivy compiler in Angular faster and more capable. While we had a lot of success, the speed wins were not obvious. While Ivy was optimized, the rest of the app was not, and at app startup the code ran without optimization because the VM hadn't warmed up.

Google has an internal framework called WIZ that powers Google Search, Flights, and Photos. WIZ is great at not executing a lot of code on app startup, and it results in a better user experience.

The realization that code runs more slowly on app startup and that it's proportional to the amount of JS to execute, is what led me to building a framework that would not need to execute code eagerly on startup. Qwik is the culmination of that goal.

What is Qwik's biggest differentiator to other frameworks?

Qwik is resumable. Qwik can transfer its internal state from the server to the client, which means that the app can become interactive on the client without having to execute any app-related code eagerly.

Resumablity is at the heart of Qwik. Qwik apps can resume because Qwik knows how to serialize the state of the app and the framework. Other frameworks know how to serialize the app state but not necessarily the framework state.

(Editor's note: Think Qwik goes into more detail on this.)

Some developers have strong opinions about the use of symbols like $ in names. Did you have any qualms and did you consider any alternatives?

Some people have visceral reactions to $ as it reminds them of jQuery or PHP.

Qwik needs a way to mark closures for extraction. JavaScript doesn't have an easy syntax for doing this so we needed to come up with our own. $ communicates to the optimizer that it needs to perform code extraction at that location, and also communicates to the developer that special rules apply there too.

We chose $ as it's one of the few non-alpha characters valid in function names and that does not change the pronunciation of the API.

Misko is CTO at Builder.io and creator of Qwik.

💻 Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.
Hired

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here's how.