Getting some closure

The Saga of Google's Closure Compiler — Dan looks back at Google’s Closure Compiler, a JavaScript transpiler Google built in 2004 and used most heavily in the pre-TypeScript era to reduce the size of JavaScript files, check types, and otherwise handle common pitfalls. A neat bit of JavaScript history.

Dan Vanderkam

Speeding up the JavaScript Ecosystem: Polyfills Gone Rogue — Marvin's mission to speed up popular libraries continues. First blogging on the topic last year, now he’s looking at the role polyfills play in making packages large and inefficient. There are two sides to every story, though, as this Hacker News thread found.

Marvin Hagemeister

Building Cross-Platform Desktop Apps with Electron — In this detailed video course Steve Kinney shares how to build robust, user-friendly Electron-based desktop apps, covering key concepts like main and renderer processes, inter-process communication, security, and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

One Thing Nobody Explained To You About TypeScript — The author makes a strong case for creating a separate tsconfig.json for each environment your code runs in: “Today, I write about one thing about configuring TypeScript that took me years to realize. I’m sure you’re making the same mistake as I did.”

Artem Zakharchenko

Upgrading Frontend Dependencies with Confidence — Writing tests for logic in our apps is easy, but how can you determine if a component isn't rendering properly? Visual regression testing. Here's a workflow based on GitHub Actions, Playwright, and Argos.

Sébastien Lorber

React Authentication — Without Complexity — Userfront streamlines authentication & access control so engineers can focus on their core business. Read the docs now.

Userfront sponsor

Understanding the Modulo % Operator — Tackles the oft misunderstood operator in Josh's visual, beginner-friendly style.

Josh W Comeau

⏱ Why the Temporal API is Awesome — It’s still a stage 3 proposal, but the Temporal API works around some of Date’s limitations without third-party libraries.

Taro Dragan

Drawing on Google Maps with Drawing Manager — A particularly thorough, code-rich followup to Integrating Google Maps in React.

Pavlo Chabanenko (Sudolabs)

Thoughts on Svelte 5 as a 3+ Year Full-Time Svelte Dev — Thoughts that lead to the proposal of Pelte, an attempt to spark conversation rather than a real tool (so far).

Filip Tangen

The Forecast For Your Next Database: Strongly Typed and Cloudy

EdgeDB sponsor

Tesseract.js 5.0: JavaScript OCR for 100+ Languages — A port of the C++-based Tesseract library used to extract text from images. v5.0 is a big deal as there are huge file size reductions resulting in a 50% decrease in runtime size, a similar reduction in memory use, and iOS 17 compatiblity. GitHub repo.

Tesseract Team

ChatGPT.js: A Library for Working with ChatGPT via the DOM — Includes a fairly extensive API that lets you interact with ChatGPT for use in Chrome extensions, Tampermonkey scripts, and so on.

KudoAI

Industry-Leading JavaScript Components for the Web — Build your apps with powerful JavaScript developer tools including reporting solutions, spreadsheets, and UI components.

GrapeCity sponsor

Instant.dev: A New Postgres-Focused ORM for JavaScript — Aims to introduce a more Ruby on Rails/Active Record-style experience to the increasingly rich JavaScript ORM ecosystem.

instant․dev

Chardet 2.0: Character Encoding Detection Library — It uses statistical methods to determine the most likely encoding of a supplied buffer, string, or file, from a selection of about 30.

Dmitry Shirokov

👾 n64js: A Nintendo 64 Emulator in JavaScript — There’s a Web-based version to try (if you have the right files) or just ▶️ watch a video.

Paul Holden

JS Crush: Match Values That Are Equal in JS — The author’s comment that this is “a game that mocks JS equality quirks, the most absurd feature of the language” should put you in the right frame of mind for giving this Candy Crush-inspired casual game a go!

Herrington Darkholme