🎄 Welcome to the final issue of 2023! We're taking a week off for Christmas, so this issue focuses on looking back at the past year and the items that intrigued you the most. We're back at full steam on January 4, 2024 and we hope you have a fantastic holiday season.
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Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team |
| 🎉 V8 is Faster and Safer Than Ever — The V8 team wants to end the year on a high and they’ve certainly pulled it off performance-wise. This post covers the highlights for the V8 engine in 2023, including the new Maglev mid-tier JIT compiler, the faster HTML parser, and support for several new JS features. Victor Gomes (V8) |
| Announcing SvelteKit 2 — SvelteKit's first official release was a year ago, and despite its relative youth, the framework has been quickly embraced by the community. This 2.0 release is an incremental one, adding support for Vite 5, and laying the groundwork for Svelte 5 which is due for release in 2024. Svelte |
| date-fns v3 Released — The hugely popular suite of 200+ functions for working with dates in JavaScript has been rewritten in TypeScript, reintroduces String date arguments, has ESM support on Node, and all functions now export via named exports. GitHub repo. Sasha Koss |
| IN BRIEF: RIP Vue 2.x: If you're using Vue 2, be prepared: Vue 2 goes 'End of Life' (EOL) on December 31st, 2023. We've revisited Robin Wieruch's 10 Web Development Trends in 2023 from January 2023 – he was on the money with all of them. Linus Schlumberger took a look back at all the main new JS and TS features of the past three years. Conversely, The New Stack took to looking at what's next for JavaScript. |
| ▶ TypeScript Origins: The Documentary — Videos don't tend to do well in JavaScript Weekly, but this was the most popular one, so I wanted to feature it again! I truly enjoyed watching all of this; it's so well made. It digs into the motivations and process behind TypeScript's creation and release, and could easily replace Die Hard in your Christmas rotation. Maybe. OfferZen |
📒 Top Articles & Tutorials of 2023 |
As determined by their popularity in JavaScript Weekly. |
| Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, The Modern Way — I'm as surprised as you, but this was the top-clicked link in 2023. If you’ve been leaning on something like Lodash for deep cloning, we “finally now have the built-in structuredClone function to make deep cloning objects in JavaScript a breeze.” Steve Sewell |
| Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework — Web Components have been having 'quite a moment' this year and this looks set to continue in 2024. This was a spicy opinion piece but the points raised provoked a lot of discussion and remain highly relevant in the JS zeitgeist. Jake Lazaroff |
| Writing JavaScript Without a Build System — Using a variety of build tools for things like bundling and transpiling is reasonably standard in modern JavaScript development, but what if you want to keep things simple? For simple things, it’s not necessary, says Julia. This led to a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Julia Evans |
Julia didn't mention them, but 2023 was also the year that import maps became broadly supported in browsers, opening up extra opportunities for build-free JavaScript. The whole topic remains a little up in the air, though, judging by the reaction to DHH's (he of Ruby on Rails fame) excitement about the 'no build' experience. |
🛠 Top Code & Tools of 2023 |
As determined by their popularity in JavaScript Weekly. |
| UnsuckJS: Comparing Lightweight JavaScript Options — A list of frontend JS libraries in a table on a single, fast page. It remains a handy way to see the relative popularity, file size, and latest versions of libraries as diverse as Preact, Bau, htmx, Hyperapp, and Mithril. Adam Hill |
| React Libraries for 2023 — The React ecosystem is so large that there's often a problem of being spoiled for choice, so opinionated guides to different solutions tend to do well, like this annual list from Robin. Robin Wieruch |
| A Huge Year for Playwright — The popular Web testing and automation framework took some serious steps forward in 2023, particularly with v1.32.0 (linked above) offering a ‘UI mode’ that lets you explore, run and debug tests in a UI environment, complete with built-in watch mode. ▶️ This video provides a good introduction. Microsoft |
| Transformers.js: Running ML Models in Your Browser — Transformers are a type of machine learning model often used in language or visual processing and while running these in the browser remains in its infancy, Transformers.js opens up some ML models to you with some impressive demos here. Xenova |
| Please note that these are the items that got the most clicks in the newsletter, but as we've covered throughout the year, many projects have had significant releases this year, including Deno, Astro, TypeScript, Node.js, Ember and Bun. That's all for now, and we'll see you again in 2024! ❄️ |
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