7 Dev Stories From January

Hey, there! January is over, so let’s look at 7 of the most interesting web dev updates from the past month.

Vue 3.4

First on the list, Vue 3.4 was released with a handful of internal improvements: The template parser was rewritten and is now two times faster; The reactivity system was refactored to make effect triggering more accurate and efficient; and various other APIs were improved for a better overall dev experience.

Quick side note, starting January 1st 2024, Vue 2 is fully deprecated, and it no longer receives new features, updates or bug fixes.

Performance on the web is a priority, and Vue is constantly working towards improving this aspect. To illustrate one of the 3.4 biggest changes, consider the following scenario. Prior to this release, the effect was fired every time the count value was changed, even though the computed result remained the same. Thanks to the new reactivity updates, the callback only fires when the computed result changes now.

Angular 17.1

Angular 17.1 was also released with a couple of big notable updates: You can now leverage the newly added signals support when working with component inputs; You can remove some of the bloat and framework overhead since change detection can now be performed without Zone.js; And you’ll gain access to a friendlier dev experience since the new control flow is slowly gaining traction.

Angular went through a major overhaul last year, and it is now focused on offering more efficient, simpler solutions for its devs. This brings Angular closer to what other modern frameworks are offering, and, thanks to improvements like the standalone module support, and new signal based input() function, creating components is now more straightforward than ever.

Bun Shell

Next, let’s look at a small quality-of-life improvement proposed by Bun. Bun, of course, is a new player in the JS runtime space which promises a performance focused engine, powerful APIs and a cohesive developer experience all aimed to run server-side JavaScript in a seamless, optimized manner.

Interacting with the shell is a pretty common task on the backend, and Bun offers now an experimental embedded language and interpreter that allows you to run cross-platform shell scripts in both JavaScript and TypeScript.

Deno 1.40

Since I mentioned JS runtimes, Deno, another Node JS alternative, reached version 1.40 in January. Deno is worth watching not only for its JS runtime capabilities. This is actually an entire platform that comes packed with built cloud primitives like the KV storage solution, Queues or Cron.

This 1.40 version introduces the powerful Temporal API for advanced date and time operations, and embraces the latest decorator syntax for more expressive code. Alongside these advancements, this release implements a series of deprecations and removals, all in preparation for the much awaited Deno v2 release.

Astro 4.2

Switching gears to metaframeworks, Astro reached version 4.2, with new experimental features, improvements to accessibility rules, the ability for remark plugins to customize image optimization in Markdown, and various other updates and bug fixes.

Probably the most interesting addition of the release is the option to prerender pages using the Speculation Rules API. This is a Chromium-exclusive for now, and allows you to prerender pages on the client, and even run client-side JavaScript on pages that the user is likely to visit next. Of course, this leads to faster browsing and a better user experience.

Next 14.1

Next.js 14.1 was released with various developer experience improvements. Most notably, Vercel is finally addressing one of the biggest pitfalls in the framework - the self-hosting support. We now have access to detailed documentation on how to self-host Next.js with a Node.js server, Docker container, or static export.

A Chain Reaction

Finally, if you have a few minutes to spare, Dan Abramov’s article exploring the work transpilers are doing under the hood to convert code into a universal web standard is an interesting read. These are complex topics in the web dev space, but, most of the time, Dan’s step by step explanations are doing wonders in demystifying fairly difficult topics. If you want to find out more about some of the tools discussed here you should check one of these videos next.

Until next time, thank you for watching.