A signal boost for JavaScript

April 4, 2024 By Mark Otto Off

A Proposal to Add Signals to JavaScript — A (very) early stage proposal for bringing a new feature to ECMAScript/JavaScript: signals! The proposal brings aboard ideas from a swathe of popular frameworks and aims to align everyone and get us on the same page when it comes to working with state and making updates based upon changes to state. Rob writes more about the proposal here.

Rob Eisenberg and Daniel Ehrenberg

Bun 1.1 Released: Now Supports Windows Too — With the lighthearted codename of Bundows, the alternative server side runtime now runs directly on Windows 10 and up (plus WSL, macOS and Linux, of course). This is a key step in its adoption, with even features like Bun Shell happy on Windows out of the box. Node compatibility continues to improve with support for node:http2 and IPC support between Bun and Node processes.

The Entire Bun Team

IN BRIEF:

  • Samuel Groß of the V8 team explains the V8 Sandbox, a security mechanism designed to prevent memory corruption in the V8 engine impacting other memory in the process.

  • Dexie.js is a popular wrapper for IndexedDB and its creator has launched Dexie Cloud, a platform to store and synchronize data between apps.

  • Svelte’s Rich Harris is ‘shaken up’ after a misunderstanding around ‘self-closing’ HTML tags and their effect on Svelte.

  • 🤡 There was a curious JS-themed April Fools prank where a .js TLD for domain names was ‘announced’. Sadly, it’s not true, but there is js.org if you want something vaguely similar.

  • An official update on the merging of Angular and Wiz.

RELEASES:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

What Even Is a JSON Number? — Despite the presence of standards around JSON, the answer is more complicated than you’d think, particularly when it comes to interfacing with other ecosystems and languages that aren’t JavaScript.

Brian Terlson

The BFCache Explained — The back/forward cache (‘bfcache’) is a browser optimization that makes going back and forward in the browser a faster experience – it’s been present for years and usually leaves you alone as a JavaScript developer, but there are things worth being aware of.

Sabatino Masala

🛠 Code & Tools