[Update 2021-06: Chrome and Edge have supported ES6 Modules in Dedicated Workers since Nov 2019. The equivalent Webkit bug is https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164860 which seems fixed since April 2021. Yay! The equivalent Mozilla bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247687 which work seems to have now started. Yay! Follow along on Can I use!]

I’ve been playing around a bit with React, since that’s where all the hot and shiny is lately. I really like it, but I can see some of the hot and shiny warts – I’ll blog about that later after I’ve been fully brainwashed had more time to play with it.

For the purposes of this exercise, one thing I’m trying to do is go the no-build-step route, where it’s all pure HTML and JavaScript. This means no JSX, no npm, no Babel. It’s really not too bad at all (unfortunately almost all examples I’ve seen online use JSX – and understandably).

It’s also given me a good stretch at using ES6 modules natively, one hot and shiny wart I’ve noticed there too.

Read the rest of this entry …

As promised, I have a tiny thing to announce here. I recently split off and refactored the code that deals binary data in kthoom into a new open source project: https://github.com/codedread/bitjs, Binary Tools for JavaScript.

The faster and faster JavaScript engines in modern browsers and the rise of new technologies like Typed Arrays, Web Workers, and the File APIs mean that browsers can actually be used to read in binary formats completely on the client-side (as long as native performance isn’t a requirement).

For now the library includes two main capabilities:

• streams for reading in bits and bytes from a Typed Array
• unarchiving zip, rar or tar files (that’s right, you can unzip and unrar in JavaScript now)