4 posts tagged with "Node.js 14"

Web applications that reach a global audience need to show the display names of languages, regions, scripts, and currencies in many different languages. The translations of those names require data, which is available in the Unicode CLDR. Packaging the data as part of the application incurs a cost on developer time. Users are likely to prefer consistent translations of language and region names, and keeping that data up to date with the world's geopolitical happenings requires constant maintenance.

Top-level await enables developers to use the await keyword outside of async functions. It acts like a big async function causing other modules who import them to wait before they start evaluating their body.

Generally, references to objects are strongly held in JavaScript, meaning that as long you have a reference to the object, it won’t be garbage-collected.

const ref = { x: 42, y: 51 };
// As long as you have access to `ref` (or any other reference to the
// same object), the object won’t be garbage-collected.

Currently, WeakMaps and WeakSets are the only way to kind-of-weakly reference an object in JavaScript: adding an object as a key to a WeakMap or WeakSet doesn’t prevent it from being garbage-collected.

const wm = new WeakMap();
{
  const ref = {};
  const metaData = 'foo';
  wm.set(ref, metaData);
  wm.get(ref);
  // → metaData
}
// We no longer have a reference to `ref` in this block scope, so it
// can be garbage-collected now, even though it’s a key in `wm` to
// which we still have access.

Several proposals expand the existing JavaScript class syntax with new functionality. This article explains the new public class fields syntax in V8 v7.2 and Chrome 72, as well as the upcoming private class fields syntax.

Here’s a code example that creates an instance of a class named IncreasingCounter:

const counter = new IncreasingCounter();
counter.value;
// logs 'Getting the current value!'
// → 0
counter.increment();
counter.value;
// logs 'Getting the current value!'
// → 1

Note that accessing the value executes some code (i.e., it logs a message) before returning the result. Now ask yourself, how would you implement this class in JavaScript? 🤔

ES2015 class syntax​

Here’s how IncreasingCounter could be implemented using ES2015 class syntax:

class IncreasingCounter {
  constructor() {
    this._count = 0;
  }
  get value() {
    console.log('Getting the current value!');
    return this._count;
  }
  increment() {
    this._count++;
  }
}

The class installs the value getter and an increment method on the prototype. More interestingly, the class has a constructor that creates an instance property _count and sets its default value to 0. We currently tend to use the underscore prefix to denote that _count should not be used directly by consumers of the class, but that’s just a convention; it’s not really a “private” property with special semantics enforced by the language.