The one with all the Rust-powered JavaScript tools

#509 — October 9, 2020

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⚙️ So many Rust-powered JavaScript tools came across our path this week that there's definitely a bit of a theme in this issue! Both Rust and Go seem particularly suited to the JS tools space, so it'll be neat to see further developments.

JavaScript Weekly

ZzFXM: A Tiny JavaScipt Music Generator— Built for ‘size-limited productions’, ZzFX lets you create a wide array of sounds with very little code. Enjoy some examples. Even more impressively there’s a tracker system for creating songs for it.

Keith Clark and Frank Force

RSLint: A Super Fast JS Linter Written in Rust— Last week we mentioned the Go-powered esbuild bundler but now Rust wants a turn at creating performance-focused JavaScript tooling. This seems to be a bit of a trend as Dr. Axel mentions next..

Riccardo D'Ambrosio

Writing JavaScript Tools in Other Languages – A New Trend?— Given what we just said about the item above, we think there’s something to Dr. Axel’s observation and are happy to see more of it.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

16 JavaScript Debugging Tips You Probably Didn’t Know— Debug your JavaScript with greater speed and accuracy using these lesser-known tips and tricks.

Raygun sponsor

Bringing the Browser DevTools to VS Code— Microsoft has released a Edge Tools for VS Code extension which takes the usual DevTools directly into the popular editor (including the Network pane).

Chris Heilmann (Microsoft)

💻 Jobs

Full-stack Engineer (React + Rails) [remote]— Reform professional education. We're bootstrapped/very profitable, are led by 3x successful founder, and we tell a lot of dad jokes.

Reforge

Find Your Next Job Through Vettery— Create a profile on Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Vettery

📚 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

The File System Access API: Simplifying Access to Local Files— You can now read files and save changes directly to those same files directly from JavaScript in the browser. It’s an open standard but not widely implemented yet except in Chrome 86.

Pete LePage and Thomas Steiner

jQuery to React: How Dropbox Rewrote the HelloSign Editor— A case study of how Dropbox went about modernizing its HelloSign e-signature acquisition by replacing 12,000 lines of jQuery-based code.

Asa Ayers

20 JavaScript and Node Experts to Follow in 2020— New Relic presents a roundup of some of our favorite JavaScript developers. Come learn what they've been up to online.

New Relic sponsor

Understanding TypeScript Generics— An introduction to the use of generics in TypeScript with examples grounded in real-world use cases. This is a long article that goes into a lot of depth.

Jamie Corkhill

Using WebXR with Babylon.js— Another indepth tutorial from Smashing Magazine covering WebXR at a high level before digging into creating immersive experiences with the Babylon.js framework.

Preston So

Go, WebAssembly, HTTP Requests and Promises— A guide to interacting with JavaScript from Go delivered in a WebAssembly context.

Alessando Segala

JavaScript's Event Loop And Call Stack Explained— What do you do when you keep learning something then forget it? Felix turns it into a blog post. Jack Archibald’s In The Loop talk also remains a fantastic resource on this front if you have 30 minutes to spare.

Felix Gerschau

Getting Started with OpenTelemetry and Distributed Tracing in Node.js

Lightstep sponsor

Redux In Web Workers? Off-Main-Thread Redux Reducers and Middleware— Several experiments to off load Redux, often used with React, from the main thread, and run some or all of Redux store in Web Workers.

Daishi Kato

Comparing the Type Safety of 8 TypeScript ORMs and Database Libraries

Prisma

🔧 Code & Tools

Volta: Install and Run JavaScript Tools Quickly— “No matter the package manager, Node runtime, or OS, one command is all you need:volta install.” It’s a bold claim, but this tool provides a way both to manage tools like node, npm and yarn but also switch versions when projects require it.

Volta

Boa v0.10: An Experimental JS Lexer, Parser and Compiler in Rust— A Rust implementation of the ECMAScript specification being worked on by a TC39 delegate. You can play with online here. Want to get more background? There’s a talk from 2019 about what’s involved.

Boa Developers

Stream Chat API & JavaScript SDK for Custom Chat Apps— Build real-time chat in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure.

Stream sponsor

Library Detector: A Chrome Extension That Detects JavaScript Libraries— A browser extension that detects a variety of different frontend libraries and frameworks and displays their icons for you. Open source or installable here.

John Michel

tsParticles 1.18.0: Particle Features for the Web— Bounce, spray, and generally throw things around visually. Enjoy the live demos here.

Matteo Bruni

Ego: A Lightweight Decision Making/State Library— A state library aimed at building game AI but you could use it for other things. XState is another more established state machine library.

Oğuz Eroğlu

ml.js 5.3: Machine Learning Tools in JavaScript— A compilation of machine learning and numerical analysis tools.

ml.js