~javascriptweekly | Issue 720 - Bun's on a roll with v1.2 (11)

Bun 1.2: A Big Step Forward for the Fast JS/TS Runtime — The JavaScriptCore-based Bun continues to up its server-side runtime game with strides forward in Node.js compatibility, performance boosts, and new APIs for interacting with S3 and S3-like object stores as well as Postgres. If you’d prefer to be ▶️ introduced to Bun 1.2 with a keynote-style video, it's a good watch.

🤖 Transformers.js v3.3: Machine Learning and AI for the Web — This is a dry release announcement but I wanted to highlight the rapid pace that this exciting library is making for browser-based NLP, speech recognition, vision, and now text-to-speech use cases (live TTS demo here - it takes a while to load though). It’s also being used in Firefox for various enhancements (see below).

🕒 JavaScript Temporal is Coming (For Real!) — We first mentioned the Temporal API proposal providing a better way to handle dates and times in JavaScript almost five years ago (in issue 496!) but now it really is almost here. Brian explains its basic concepts and where initial support is starting to appear.

Avoiding anys with Linting and TypeScript — any is TypeScript’s famous type fallback/safety hatch but if you can avoid it, you can benefit more from TypeScript’s type-checking features. Josh shares some tips to do just that.

[Workshop] How to Build Testing Culture on Your Team — Join our live session to learn strategies for gaining buy-in, balancing testing, and integrating it into daily workflows.

🤖 Running Inference in Web Extensions — Firefox Nightly is shipping with a new API that can let you use their AI runtime for offline machine learning tasks in Web extensions you create. It uses the previously mentioned Transformers.js and is already used in Firefox 133 to provide alt text for images in PDFs.

deck.gl 9.1: GPU-Powered Large Scale Data Visualization — deck.gl provides a way to create complex yet high performance data visualizations composed of multiple layers (examples). It can be used in a vanilla JS way or through React components and it’s ready for WebGPU.

ArkType 2.0: Runtime Validation Library — An easy-to-deploy solution for schema validation that can infer TypeScript definitions 1:1 and use them as optimized validators for your data, both at runtime and for immediate type-level feedback in your editor.

NodeBB v4.0.0 Released: Node.js Powered Forums — Offers a classic forum experience in a modern Node.js-shaped guise. v4 adds support for federation between instances and the wider 'fediverse.'

SRCL: Build React Apps with 'Terminal Aesthetics' — The homepage is a live demonstration of what SRCL has to offer. It’s a suite of React components and styling to recreate a monospaced, terminal-like atmosphere

🎶 Chiptune.js: Module / Tracker File Player — A library for playing ‘module’ music files like MOD, XM and S3M. (Demo.)