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21 articles
When Brendan Eich created the very first version of JavaScript for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in merely ten days, it’s likely that he did not expect how far the Slack Desktop App would take his invention: We use one JavaScript code base to build a multi-threaded desktop application, routinely interacting with native code, targeting Windows, macOS,…
The Web streams API has become ubiquitous in JavaScript runtimes but was designed for a different era. Here's what a modern streaming API could (should?) look like.
With the npm acquisition complete, we’re ready to start the next chapter of npm and support the JavaScript community in a new way.
We believe the true dream of cloud computing is that your code lives in the network itself. Your code doesn't run in "us-west-4", it runs everywhere.
You see this everywhere, but as a lifelong gamer, my personal favorite example is probably graphics cards. In the '90s, graphics hardware generally provided a fixed set of functionality.
Meta Open Source is officially transferring Jest, its open source JavaScript testing framework, to the OpenJS Foundation. With over 17 million weekly downloads and over 38,000 GitHub stars, Jest i…
Cloudflare investigated CPU performance benchmark results for Workers, uncovering and fixing issues in infrastructure, V8 garbage collection, and OpenNext optimizations. These improvements have made Cloudflare Workers faster for all customers.
We should be giving all agents tools that excel at what’s important for an AI model. Kitesurf is Cloudflare’s new stateless, highly scalable, and cost-effective web browser that runs entirely on top of Workers and was designed specifically for the Agentic Cloud.
webpack is a brilliant tool for bundling frontend assets. When things start to slow down, though, its batteries-included nature and the ocean of third-party tooling can make it difficult to optimize. Poor performance is the norm and not the exception. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and so — after many hours of research, trial,…
We’ve open-sourced MemLab, a JavaScript memory testing framework that automates memory leak detection. Finding and addressing the root cause of memory leaks is important for delivering a quality us…
As Airbnb builds more of its Frontend around Server Side Rendering, we took a look at how to optimize our server configurations to support…
Overview: We recently rethought the architecture for the JavaScript side of our codebase at Airbnb. This post will look at (1) the product…
Vinext 1.0 graduates from an AI experiment to a production-ready framework, letting developers run Next.js apps on Vite. This release brings advanced cache warming, broader compatibility, and an automated testing pipeline.
Workers now enables Node.js compatibility by default, supports applications up to 64 mebibytes, and adds a URL-based module registry with import.meta, lazy compilation, shared code caches, and clearer errors.
While we’re working on getting our Shopify Functions infrastructure ready for the public beta, we thought we’d use this opportunity to shine some light on how we brought JavaScript to WebAssembly, how we made everything fit within our very tight Shopify Function constraints, and what our plans for the future look like.
Since joining Cloudflare, VoidZero has delivered more than 80 releases that drastically speed up JavaScript compilation, linting, and testing. From a 10x faster React compiler to Vite+ 1.0, here’s how we are building faster tools for developers and AI agents.
V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in C++. v8go is a library written in Go and C++ allowing users to execute JavaScript from Go using V8 isolates. Using Cgo bindings allows us to run JavaScript in Go at native performance. The v8go library, developed by Roger Chapman, aims to provide an idiomatic way for Go developers to interface with V8. As it turns out, this can be tricky. For the past few months, I’ve been contributing to v8go to expose functionality in V8. In particular, I’ve been adding support to expose the V8 CPU Profiler. From the start, I wanted this new API to be: easy for the library's Go users to reason about easy to extend for other profiler functionality eventually aligned closely with the V8 API as performant as possible. The point about performance is especially interesting. I theorized that my first iteration of the implementation was less performant than a proposed alternative. Without benchmarking them, I proceeded to rewrite. That second implementation was merged, and I moved on with my life. So when I was like "Hey! I should write a post about the PR and benchmark the results" only to actually see the benchmarks and reconsider everything. If you’re interested in API development, Go/Cgo/C++ performance or the importance of good benchmarks, this is a story for you. Backing Up to the Starting Line: What Was My Goal? The goal of adding the V8 CPU Profiler to v8go was so users of the library could measure the performance of any JavaScript being executed in a given V8 context. Besides providing insight on the code being executed, the profiler returns information about the JavaScript engine itself including garbage collection cycles, compilation and recompilation, and code optimization. While virtual machines and the like can run web applications incredibly fast, code should still be performant, and it helps to have data to understand when it's not. If we have access to a CPU profiler, we can
Hydrogen is a framework that combines React and Vite for creating custom storefronts on Shopify. It maximizes performance for end-users and provides a best-in-class developer experience for you and your team. Since it focuses on evergreen browsers, Hydrogen can leverage modern capabilities, best practices, and the latest tooling in web development to bring the future of ecommerce closer. Creating a framework requires a lot of choices for frontend tooling. One major part of it is the bundler. Traditionally, developers had no native way to organize their code in JavaScript modules. Therefore, to minimize the amount of code and waterfall requests in the browser, new frontend tools like Webpack started to appear, powering projects such as Next.js and many more. Bundling code became the de facto practice for the last decade, especially when using view libraries like React or Vue. Whereas these tools successfully solved the problem, they quickly became hard to understand and maintain due to the increasing complexity of the modern web. On top of that, the development process started to slow down because bundling and compiling are inherently slow: the more files in a project, the more work the tool needs to do. Repeat this process for every change made in a project during active development, and one can quickly notice how the developer experience (DX) tanks. Bundle-based dev server image from Vite.js docs Thanks to the introduction of ES Modules (a native mechanism to author JavaScript modules) and its support in browsers, some new players like Snowpack and Parcel appeared and started shaping up the modern web development landscape. Native ESM-based dev server from Vite.js docs This new generation of web tooling aims to improve the DX of building apps. Whereas Webpack needs a complex configuration, even for simple things due to its high flexibility, these new tools provide very sensible but configurable default values. Furthermore, they leverage native ES Modules to minimize the amount of bundling required during development. In particular, they tend to
Batman.js is Shopify’s new open source CoffeeScript framework, and I’m absolutely elated to introduce it to the world after spending so much time on it. Find Batman on GitHub here. Batman emerges into a world populated with extraordinary frameworks being used to great effect. With the incredible stuff being pushed out in projects like Sproutcore 2.0 and Backbone.js, how is a developer to know what to use when? There’s only so much time to play with cool new stuff, so I’d like to give a quick tour of what makes Batman different and why you might want to use it instead of the other amazing frameworks available today. Batman makes building apps easy Batman is a framework for building single page applications. It’s not a progressive enhancement or a single purpose DOM or AJAX library. It’s built from the ground up to make building awesome single page apps by implementing all the lame parts of development like cross browser compatibility, data transport, validation, custom events, and a whole lot more. We provide handy helpers for development to generate and serve code, a recommended app structure for helping you organize code and call it when necessary, a full MVC stack, and a bunch of extras, all while remaining less than 18k when gzipped. Batman doesn’t provide only the basics, or the whole kitchen sink, but a fluid API that allows you to write the important code for your app and none of the boilerplate. A super duper runtime At the heart of Batman is a runtime layer used for manipulating data from objects and subscribing to events objects may emit. Batman’s runtime is used similarly to SproutCore’s or Backbone’s in that all property access and assignment on Batman objects must be done through someObject.get and someObject.set, instead of using standard dot notation like you might in vanilla JavaScript. Adhering to this property system allows you to: transparently access “deep” properties which may be simple data or computed
6 minute read This September, we quietly launched a new version of the Shopify admin. Unlike the launch of the previous major iteration of our admin, this version did not include a major overhaul of the visual design, and for the most part, would have gone largely unnoticed by the user. Why would we rebuild our admin without providing any noticeable differences to our users? At Shopify, we strongly believe that any decision should be able to be questioned at any time. In late 2012, we started to question whether our framework was still working for us. This post will discuss the problems in the previous version of our admin, and how we decided that it was time to switch frameworks.