Dev News: React 19, Bun Comes to Angular, and GitHub AI Fund

It’s been two years since React 18 was released, so it should come as no surprise that there’s a bit of anticipation around React 19’s release. And it’s coming soon, promised a recent React blog post.

“After a couple of years of iteration, react@canary is now ready to ship to react@latest. The new features mentioned above are compatible with any environment your app runs in, providing everything needed for production use. Since Asset Loading and Document Metadata may be a breaking change for some apps, the next version of React will be a major version: React 19,” the team wrote in Thursday’s update post. It’s the first blog update in 10 months.

“In React 19, we’re also adding long-requested improvements which require breaking changes like support for Web Components,” they continued. “Our focus now is to land these changes, prepare for release, finalize docs for new features, and publish announcements for what’s included.”

Theo Browne, a YouTube programmer focused on the frontend and CEO of Ping.gg, offers a breakdown of the significance of this news and insights into React Canary. He also pointed out this recent X (Twitter) post by React core team member Andrew Clark, which generated a good amount of positive buzz:

Angular Updates with Signal-Related APIs, Bun Support

Angular v18 is coming in May, but this week’s release of Angular v17.2 held a few advance treats for developers, including two new Signal-related APIs and CLI support for the JavaScript runtime and Node competitor Bun.

The APIs are part of Angular’s revamp of its reactivity model using Signals, explained Minko Gechev, product and developer relations lead for Angular at Google. They’re released in developer preview so that developers can provide feedback to the Google team before they’re finalized, he added. The v17.2 release includes two APIs:

1. Signal Queries: The original view queries API that Angular has used since its release needs type safety and has “suboptimal developer ergonomics,” Gechev said. “At the same time, signals are a great primitive for representing values that change over time,” he continued. Last year, the team proposed signal-based queries and that’s the API released this week. The developer preview code was shared on Gechev’s post.
2. Model Inputs: Signal inputs are read-only to enforce best practices, according to Gechev. In order to share state between a parent and child component, Angular needed writable signals — that’s where the Model Inputs API comes in. “This pattern enables us to have two-way data-binding with signals,” Gechev said.

Also new in this release is support in the CLI for Bun, a Node alternative. Bun can process roughly three times more HTTP requests per second than Node.js when rendering React server-side.

This Angular update also includes experimental support for Material 3 theming in Angular Material and two performance enhancements: Hydration debugging support in Angular’s DevTools and an image loader for Netlify.

Astro 4.4 Offers Improved Streaming Performance

JavaScript framework Astro released v4.4 Thursday, with improved streaming performance and the addition of performance audits.

Astro recently learned that ReadableStreams were slower than expected on Node.js, so the team migrated Astro to use AsyncIterable instead on Node.js.

“Notably, this change reduced the build time of Starlight websites with large sidebars by up to 47% in extreme cases,” the team wrote.

No changes are required to take advantage of this improvement, which will help with both static builds and runtime performance, they added.

The team also added performance audits for the dev toolbar.

“Much like the accessibility audits currently available, performance audits will help you identify and fix performance issues in your Astro site,” the Astro team wrote. “For example, the dev toolbar will now warn you when a lazy-loaded image is above the fold, recommending instead that you use eager loading for better performance.”

There’s also now a small UI on the dev toolbar’s audit app that will show a list of problems detected. The list lets developers jump to the relevant parts of the page to address any identified problems. Plans are to expand the information provided and include advice about how to fix the problem.

Also in this release: New inferSize properties that allow Astreo to automatically infer the dimensions of remote image

GitHub Offers $400K to Devs Building Open Source AI Projects

GitHub is offering $400,000 in funding, marketing and mentorship to ten developers creating an open source AI-based solution, as GitHub’s Accelerator Program enters a second cohort. This year’s theme is the complex task of making AI advancements in the open. It comes after GitHub saw a significant spike in the total number of Generative AI projects.

Winners will receive $40,000 in undiluted funds, as well as free access to GitHub Copilot, an introduction and an office hour with Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, and up to $350,000 in Azure AI infrastructure (including preferred access to high-end GPU virtual machine clusters).

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis until the 12 p.m. PST deadline on March 5, with the cohort kickoff scheduled for April 22.

GitHub also announced additional monies, backed by M12, to fund early-stage open source startups and provide them with resources such as GPU access for model training and tuning, as well as networking opportunities.