Rich Harris, Svelte’s creator, says Svelte 5 is going to be radical, and as proof he offered a chart showing how many lines of Code it creates for various functions versus Svelte 4 and, more significantly, vanilla JavaScript. For most of the functions he lists, it runs neck-and-neck with vanilla JavaScript.We’re thinking this shift is made possibly by the promised code modernization he told The New Stack about earlier this year.The Svelte team is switching the underlying code from TypeScript to JavaScript — no, you read that right, that’s actually what he said. We double-checked after several developers told us that couldn’t be right.“People are getting confused because they assume that JavaScript means ‘no types,’ but what we’re actually doing is converting our .ts files to .js files with type annotations in JSDoc comments rather than TypeScript syntax,” Harris told The New Stack. “This gives us equivalent type safety but eliminates the friction normally associated with things like TypeScript.”Google announced a new browser-based development “experience” that’s built on Google Cloud and leverages Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2. It also supports Next.js deployment via a Firebase Hosting integration.Google did not specify whose code or where it comes from in the blog post.Project IDX leverages the AI Codey, which as of now supports C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Python, Ruby and TypeScript, among others.It’s also built on Visual Studio Code using Code OSS, which should give you some idea of where they’re headed with this. It has pre-baked templates for Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte, Vue and languages such as JavaScript, Dart and soon Python and Go, the post stated.“At the heart of Project IDX is our conviction that you should be able to develop from anywhere, on any device, with the full fidelity of local development,” the blog post stated. “Every Project IDX workspace has the full capabilities of a Linux-based VM, paired with the universal access that comes with being hosted in the cloud, in a data center near you.”Project IDX includes a built-in web preview and there are plans to add an Android emulator and an embedded iOS simulator.It integrates Firebase Hosting, which allows developers to deploy a shareable preview of a web app or to deploy to production.“And because Firebase Hosting supports dynamic backends, powered by Cloud Functions, this works great for full-stack frameworks like Next.js,” the blog post added. That functionality put it neatly in place to compete with Vercel and Netlify, which also support Next.js deployments.Speaking of Vercel and Next.js, the frontend development company released Next.js Commerce 2.0 Monday and it’s all about speed.In a blog post, the company points out e-commerce sites took a hit with Google when page experience became a ranking factor in search results. Amazon, for instance, found that just 100 milliseconds of extra load time cost the e-tailer 1% in sales. There are a lot of reasons, including personalization, images and videos, for why this is a hard problem for e-commerce sites to solve, the blog post explained.The updated solution leverages Next.js 13 and introduces an app router, it noted, to create storefronts that feel static but are completely dynamic.It includes a dynamic storefront, simplified architecture (a single provider per repository), which results in less code, the post notes. There’s also a new e-commerce accelerator template, which features best patterns for building composable commerce applications, including support for BigCommerce, Medusa, Saleor, Shopify and Swell.Microsoft announced the TypeScript 5.2 RC on Tuesday. So what’s new? Maintainer Daniel Rosenwasser walked through the updates, which includes:Community created roadmaps, articles, resources and journeys fordevelopers to help you choose your path and grow in your career.