The tale of how static typing came to JavaScript

July 20, 2023 By Mark Otto Off

TypeScript and the Dawn of Gradual Types — From GitHub’s ReadME project comes a thorough journalistic take on how static typing made it into the JavaScript world, what TypeScript offers, some alternative approaches, and the possibility of adding type annotations to JavaScript iself.

Mike Melanson (GitHub)

Five Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript — A brief dose of reality for a world seemingly obsessed with TypeScript: “If you want to get into TypeScript, don’t think you can leave JavaScript behind. It will find you, and it will get you.”

Stefan Baumgartner

🎉 RELEASES:

  • Fresh 1.3 – The Deno web framework. Plugins can now inject routes and middleware into apps, there’s Deno.serve support, and you can create async route components.

  • Downshift 8.0 – Primitives to build WAI-ARIA compliant React autocomplete, combobox & select components.

  • Node.js v18.17.0 (LTS) – Node 18 gets the Ada 2.0 WHATWG URL parser.

  • Fastify 4.20 – The fast, low overhead web Node.js framework.

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

💡 Psst.. if you use Postgres at all, we have a Postgres newsletter too!

Updating Code with jscodeshiftTypeORM is an ORM for Node that introduced some breaking changes requiring the author to update lots of calls in his code. A perfect time to use a ‘codemod’ to automate the job. Even if you don’t use TypeORM, this post might give you some ideas for other places to use such an approach.

Clinton Blackburn

How React 18 Improves App Performance — If you’ve not entirely kept up with how things have changed or developed in React with regards to concurrent rendering, transitions, Suspense, and even React Server Components, this is a fantastic review and primer to get up to speed on how React’s newer features dramatically help with performance.

Lydia Hallie (Vercel)

🛠 Code & Tools

YouTube.js 5.5: A Wrapper Around YouTube’s Private API — One of those things you’d expect to be quickly blocked somehow, but it’s 18 months old, so… 😆 The fun isn’t just for Node or Deno users – it’ll work in the browser if you can proxy the requests through your own server.

LuanRT

Eruda 3.0: A Console for Mobile Browsers — If you’re in a situation where you have no access to DevTools, you can add Eruda to your page and it provides a sort of virtual devtools you can use from any browser, including on mobile.

LiriLiri

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.

🎵 Thank you for the music..

P.S. If you’re looking for something specific to listen to, the music by famed Norwegian tracker Jogeir Liljedahl is well worth a try – particularly Overture or Guitar Slinger. Or how about Donkey Kong Country’s dreamy Aquatic Ambience? It’s striking how trackers managed to squeeze so much down into a few hundred kilobytes by the heavy reuse and manipulation of samples.