Welcome to Bytes! ✨
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Bytes! Over the past month I’ve slowly realized that there’s so much exciting stuff happening in the Svelte, JavaScript, and Web Dev communities, and I wanted a venue to share these with others. My goal with Bytes is to provide weekly insights into these communities by compiling content from Twitter, HackerNews, various blogs, and other content sources. I hope this provides some value to you and that you’ll stay subscribed!
Week In Review
Prettier 3.0 ✨
Prettier, the industry standard JavaScript formatter, released its version 3.0. This release includes support for plugins with async parsers, full support for config files written in ESM format, as well as a number of other changes.
array-by-copy Lands in Firefox 🦊
Mozilla announced Firefox 115, which most notably introduces the ECMAScript proposal change-array-by-copy. This proposal provides additional methods on Array.prototype and TypedArray.prototype to enable changes on the array by returning a new copy of it with the change. The proposal has already been added to the ECMAScript spec, and Firefox is the last major browser to ship support for it, although it is still behind a flag.
A look at Svelte 5??? 👀
Dominic Gannaway, former React core team member and author of JavaScript libraries like Lexical, recently joined Vercel to contribute to Svelte full-time. On Wednesday, Dominic tweeted asking Svelte users what features they’d like to see in Svelte 5. Here are some highlights from the replies…
Improvements to how stores are used between Svelte and JS/TS files: Currently, stores can only be accessed with the dollar prefix (
$storeName), inside a Svelte file. Many users would like to see a unified API for accessing stores, regardless of the file you’re using them in.TypeScript syntax in Svelte templates: Many people expressed a desire to use TypeScript syntax inside of Svelte templates.
Remove the need to reassign arrays/objects: Many new Svelte users get tripped up by how certain array/object mutations don’t cause Svelte to re-render the template. This requires users to reassign the value after the mutation. To see an example, checkout this Svelte REPL.
Vite 4.4.0 adds support for Lightening CSS ⚡️
On July 6th, Vite 4.4.0 was released, closing a number of bugs, adding a number of small features, and upgrading esbuild to v0.18. Most notably, this minor version adds experimental support for Lightning CSS - a CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier written in Rust. Lightning CSS advertises 100x faster CSS builds than existing JS tooling (NanoCSS) and 4x faster builds than the popular esbuild (written in Golang).
Community Content 🎥
Jake Archibald writes about the case against self-closing tags in HTML
Ben Davis talks about how SvelteKit has gotten him excited about web development again in a Youtube video. This video is a part of a series where Ben is building a todo application using SvelteKit and a Go backend
Svelte community member, Theo Steiner, responds to Youtuber Theo Browne’s video “Don’t pick the wrong tool” in a blog post
TypeScript Wizard, Matt Pocock, released an excellent video diving into TypeScript declaration files and how you’re probably using them incorrectly
Johan Rosenkilde, an Engineer at Github Next, writes about improvements to Github Copilot on the Github blog
OSS Spotlight 🔦
noodle.run
Noodle is an open source education platform that allows students to to manage their education in an intuitive user interface. Features include course subject management, note taking, task management, and flash cards, to name a few.
As an open source platform, Noodle strives to cultivate a community of students and developers who can collectively contribute to building the most exceptional student productivity platform.
The lead maintainer, Ahmed Elsakaan, has been working on Noodle since May 2022, however the project has gotten a lot of attention on Twitter over the past week, causing Github stars to shoot from less than 1,000 to over 5,000. Nice work, Ahmed!
written by Jacob Stordahl