The JavaScript 2021 megamix

1. ES2021: Here's the Features (Quickly) — Back in June of this year, the Ecma General Assembly approved ES2021. Work continues with ECMAScript 2022 already having a draft spec. But this post flying through what's new in ES2021 (not a lot!) was by far our most popular link of the year, amazingly. Dr. Axel Rauschmayer also had a popular post rounding up ES2021.

Hemanth HM

2. Comparing Svelte and React — After spending an extended period of time working with both, the author identified his preference based on first hand observations supported with real-world examples. I suspect 2022 will continue to see Svelte taking big leaps forward.

Jack Franklin

3. Comparing the New Generation of Build Tools — A detailed evaluation of a variety of approaches for bundling JavaScript and other front-end assets, including Snowpack, esbuild, Vite, and wmr. A handy overview.

Hugh Haworth

4. 'Rust is the Future of JavaScript Infrastructure' — It’s an opinion but the (still) growing evidence is compelling. Rust (as well as Go) is now being heavily used to replace parts of the JavaScript tooling ecosystem that might have otherwise been written in JS before (e.g. Rome, SWC, dprint).

Lee Robinson

5. The State of Web Workers in 2021 — The web is single-threaded, but two years ago Surma told us why to always use Web Workers and why to bring multithreading to your solutions despite the difficulties. Almost every client supports them now, so Surma made the case again.

Surma

6. Rethinking JavaScript's Ternary Operator — ternary ? "yes" : "no" … A lot of developers regard the ternary operator “with suspicion”, says James. Does its brevity warrant its use alone? Is it something you can “trust”? James also looks at a future alternative coming to the language.

James Sinclair

zx: A Tool for Writing Better Shell Scripts — Rather than using something like bash to throw together a quick script, zx provides a variety of niceties to do the same with the JavaScript you know and love.

Google

Over 100 Algorithms and Data Structures Demonstrated in JS — Examples of many common algorithms (e.g. bit manipulation, Pascal’s triangle, Hamming distance) and data structures (e.g. linked lists, tries, graphs) with explanations.

Oleksii Trekhleb et al.

HTM 3.1.0: A JSX Alternative using Standard Tagged Templates — This clever library has been around a few years but continues to see updates. Think JSX-style syntax but in plain JavaScript (using tagged templates) that requires no transpilation but still supports things like rest spread and referencing components.

Jason Miller

Tagify: An Elegant Input Component for Tags — The polished demos show a lot of effort has been put in here. GitHub repo.

Yair Even-Or

Typehole: VS Code Tool to Automatically Generate TypeScript Types and Interfaces — An extension that helps you automate creating the initial static types for runtime values.

Riku Rouvila

Cheetah Grid: The Fastest Open-Source Data Table for the Web? — A bold claim from a library we hadn't encountered before. There’s a live demo here with 1,000,000 records in a table if you want to try it for yourself, though. A new release just dropped this week too.

Future Corp