JavaScript, ML and LLMs

Bun 1.0: Is It a Toolkit? Is It a Runtime? It's Both — You’ve used Node, you’ve seen Deno, now Bun has grown up too. It’s a performance-oriented server-side JS runtime built atop JavaScriptCore and makes the unique claim of being “a drop-in replacement for Node.js.” It includes extras like transpilation, bundling, package management, and a Jest-compatible test runner too. The post goes into a lot of depth, but we enjoyed the Bun team’s ▶️ 10 minute introductory video. Does Bun deliver on all its promises yet? No. Is it promising? Yes.

Jarred Sumner et al.

Why Does every() Return true for Empty Arrays? — Nicholas wondered how a condition can possibly be satisfied when there aren’t any values to test, so he dug into the language specs to understand the logic.

Nicholas C. Zakas

The Complete UI Component Library For Enterprise Web Apps — A professional UI component library with power widgets like data grid, calendar, scheduler & Gantt charts. Includes API docs, guides and an unreasonable amount of demos to play with. Seamlessly integrates with React, Angular, Vue & Salesforce apps.

Bryntum sponsor

A First Look at TypeScript 5.3 — TypeScript 5.2 landed a few weeks ago, which means TypeScript 5.3 is already in the works (the final release is due in November), with possible features to think about including Import Attributes, throw expressions, and isolated declarations.

Matt Pocock

JavaScript's New Array Grouping Methods — A look at Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy. The proposal including these methods is currently at stage 3 at TC39, but initial support is creeping into dev builds of browsers.

Phil Nash

JPEG and EXIF Data Manipulation in JavaScript — A look at how to pick through the JPEG format and read and replace EXIF tags directly without leaning on a third party library.

Cédric Patchane

Frontend Performance Monitoring 101 — Learn the basics of JavaScript application performance monitoring to see (and fix) slow faster. Join us for a live AMA.

Sentry sponsor

Running a Playwright Script on AWS Lambda — If you’ve struggled to make it work too, Matt has some pointers.

Matt Steele

A New Method to Validate URLs — URL.canParse isn’t broadly supported yet, but can be easily polyfilled.

Stefan Judis

How to Run a GitHub Gist with npx — This is an interesting way to quickly deploy a script.

Kelly Fox

Shadcn for Vue: Components You Can Copy and Paste — A community-led Vue port of the React-oriented shadcn/ui, a suite of attractive components built with Tailwind CSS and Radix UI, thus making them easy to ‘copy and paste’ into your own apps.

Radix Vue Project

FlexGrid by Wijmo: The Industry-Leading JavaScript Datagrid

Wijmo from GrapeCity sponsor

npm-check-updates: Update package.json Dependencies to Latest Versions — That is, as opposed to the specified versions. It include a handy -i interactive mode so you can look at potential upgrades and then opt in to them one by one.

Raine Revere

Starry Night 3.0: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting — GitHub’s own syntax highlighter isn’t open source, but Starry Night uses WebAssembly (to get access to the Oniguruma regex engine) to get as close as it can.

Titus Wormer

Vuestic 1.8: Open Source UI Library for Vue 3 — A library of more than 60 customizable components. v1.8 introduces new Layout and Textarea components. Official homepage.

Epicmax

Goxygen 0.7: Quickly Generate a Go Backend for a JS Project — A tool that sets up a new Go-based project with Angular, React, or Vue in the front-end, and Docker and Docker Compose files to make it all work.

Sasha Shpota

Deliver Real-Time Live Streams with Amazon IVS — Amazon IVS enables developers to create dynamic real-time and low-latency video experiences. Click here to learn more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

xterm.js 5.3.0: Build Terminals in the Browser — It’s used in many projects like VS Code, cPanel, Azure Cloud Shell, and other browser-based IDEs. There’s a live demo on the homepage to try.

xterm.js team

Transformers.js: State-of-the-Art Machine Learning for the Web — A JavaScript library designed to be functionally equivalent to Hugging Face’s transformers Python library meaning you can run the same pretrained models using a very similar API. You can do things like ML-powered speech recognition directly in your browser using OpenAI’s Whisper model. GitHub repo.

Joshua Lochner et al.

Microsoft TypeChat: An Approach for Type-Safe LLM Responses — Anders Hejlsberg and Daniel Rosenwasser of TypeScript fame are just two of the prominent names attached to this project, demonstrating the huge interest within MS for LLMs. TypeChat’s goal is to work around the issue of LLMs outputting unstructured natural language and to direct output into a typed form.

Hejlsberg, Lucco, Rosenwasser et al.

WebLLM: Run LLM Models in the Browser with WebGPU — Less directly JavaScript, as it uses WebGPU, but yet another way to run large language models directly within the browser and that you can control from JavaScript. GitHub repo.

MLC LLM

TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning for JavaScript Developers — Slightly lower level, but a great way to train and deploy models in the browser or in Node.js. There are, of course, lots of demos, too.

TensorFlow