JavaScript And The Web
Bitmasks and the new React Context API | Haukur Hallvarðsson - A nice rundown of one aspect of the new React Context API that is likely to be familiar to low-level developers but will probably be a new idea to many front end devs: using bitmasks to test a condition.
MobX 4: Better, simpler, faster, smaller | Michel Weststrate - MobX continues to be a fantastic state management libary and this update looks like it will make it even better.
Lighter than Lightweight: How We Built the Same App Twice with Preact and Glimmer.js | LinkedIn Engineering - This is a really cool real world comparison of 2 JavaScript frameworks, where they actually built the same app in 2 separate frameworks, with core contributors to each framework involved in the implementation. To be honest, my main takeaway is that among modern frameworks “framework performance” can be a bit overrated, and not a great reason to choose a specific library or framework, as compared to factors like developer experience, community, and fit with the existing codebase.
Rust And WebAssembly
I’ve been thinking about taking the time to learn a new language for the first time in a while. I think WebAssembly and Rust transpiled to WebAssembly in particular are going to become an important part of high performance JavaScript applications and frameworks/libraries. So I’m starting to check it out. Here are a few recent relevant links
Making WebAssembly better for Rust & for all languages – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog - This outlines a plan to improve the developer experience of what I think is the future of WebAssembly in most web apps: interop with JavaScript to improve performance of open source libraries and some core performance sensitive code.
GitHub - atom/xray: An experimental next-generation Electron-based text editor - A non-webassembly example of using Rust selectively to increase performance of an application built primarily using web technologies.
Rust’s 2018 Roadmap | Rust Blog - A good rundown of the areas of focus for Rust this year. I’m particularly interested in their target use cases, since 3 of them (CLI tools, Network Services and WebAssembly/the web) are things that I have built before and will build again.