Angular 18, Kotlin’s New Compiler, Astro Adds React 19 Support

As of Wednesday, Angular 18 is available. The release “focused on polishing the work we shipped,” which involved graduating many of the new APIs to stable and addressing common developer requests, according to Google’s Angular Product and DevRel Lead Minko Gechev.

It also offers experimental support for “one of the most desired roadmap projects: Zoneless change detection,” he wrote in this blog post about Angular 18. He called zoneless a core part of the evolution Angular has been going through.

Zone.js is the library responsible for triggering Angular’s change detection. For years, Angular has been working on creating a way to use Angular that doesn’t rely on this library. This release includes the first experimental APIs for zoneless. The benefits for developers include improved composability for micro-frontends and interoperability with other frameworks; plus:

The best way to use zoneless in your components is with signals, Gechev wrote, explaining how to do that.

Version 18 also uses the same scheduler for zones apps and apps using zone.js with coalescing enabled, he continued.

“To reduce the number of change detection cycles in new zone.js apps, we’ve also enabled zone coalescing by default,” Gechev wrote. “This behavior is enabled only for new applications because it can cause bugs in apps reliant on the previous change detection behavior. Coalescing reduces unnecessary change detection cycles and significantly improves performance for some applications.”

The details were also covered in an Angular YouTube broadcast on Thursday.

In other news, Angular has a new home for official developer documentation called Angular.dev. There are also interactive tutorials and a playground with examples. Improved search, refreshed guides and simplified navigation, he wrote.

Vercel Prioritizes Spend on AI, Security

Vercel held its Ship Conference in New York this week, where it detailed more about its plans to support artificial intelligence application development on the frontend. Among the announcements was a new tool for simplifying the creation of AI chatbot interfaces and the Vercel Web Application Firewall.

The firewall is designed to provide security at the edge, and promises to reduce latency while “ensuring only legitimate users access your application,” the company stated. It deploys automatically on the Vercel platform, without additional configuration or integration.

Vercel also is simplifying feature flags by allowing developers to override feature flags directly from the Vercel Toolbar. “This eliminates the need to switch tabs to log in to your external flag provider and is already improving workflows for companies like Notion and Leonardo.Ai,” the company noted.

Ahead of the conference, the frontend cloud platform also announced a funding round of $250 million, based on its valuation of $3.25 billion.

The funding infusion will be used to build out its frontend cloud, its AI SDK and enterprise-grade security, the company noted in a prepared statement.

Astro Updates

Web framework Astro updated again this week, this time rolling out full support for React 19. React 19 is available as a release candidate. It can be used with Astro Actions, which is similar to React Actions, according to Astro frontend developer Ben Holmes.

“It’s our way of defining an RPC endpoint in Astro,” Holmes explained to The New Stack via X. “It takes the basics of a server action and adds features for error handling and input validation.”

Astro ranked as the fastest-growing web framework in both usage and satisfaction in Netlify’s most recent developer survey.

This release also includes the “long-awaited” container API, which lets developers render Astro components outside of an Astro application. It’s similar to how developers can render React components on the server using libraries like react-dom/server, or Preact components using preact-render-to-string, the team noted.

GitKraken Launches New DevEx Platform

GitKraken, which makes developer tools, released what it called a “unified developer experience platform” for enterprise teams. The company noted that clients such as Amazon, Netflix and NASA have used the tool to offer developers a streamlined, less distracting development experience.

The launch also adds support for Google Gemini, to help developers understand and interpret complex commit messages, the company said in a press release. GitKraken already supported the OpenAI and Anthropic models.

Also announced: GitKraken acquired “code health innovator” CodeSee, which brings to the company AI-powered code understanding.

JetBrains Releases Kotlin 2.0 with Rearchitected K2 Compiler

JetBrains released a major update to the Kotlin programming language this week at KotlinConf 2024.

The release includes a stable version of the K2 compiler, which has been rewritten from scratch based on a new architecture that the Kotlin team said improves performance and boosts daily productivity. In tests, the compilation time was up to two times faster with Kotlin 2.0 than with Kotlin 1.9.20. The team said the compiler also behaves more consistently and understands the code better. So far, about 15,000 developers have already started using K2 in its earlier version, including Meta.

The new compiler architecture will also enable the team to evolve the language more easily and introduce new features “faster and in a consistent and platform-agnostic way,” Egor Tolstoy, Kotlin’s project lead, said in a press release.

JetBrains is also releasing the open source Kotlin dataset, together with 7B Kotlin Language model. They’re now available for researchers and others to experiment and use in training large language models and AI-based code generators train. The goal is to improve the quality of the Kotlin code AI generates, the team noted.

The new release also includes an improved tooling experience for Kotlin Multiplatform by offering an all-in-one tool for Kotlin Multiplatform Development built on the Fleet platform.

“The development environment preview is available; it fully understands Xcode projects and has full support for Swift, including experimental Swift export functionality to get pure Swift APIs for shared Kotlin code, meaning that developers who write platform-specific code for iOS get full support from the code editor, including inspections, navigation, and refactoring that even work across languages,” the press release stated.

On a side note, Google is now recommending Kotlin as the programming language for Android and multiplatform development, according to JetBrains. As part of that, Google added support for Kotlin to some of its popular libraries for Android developers but also migrated some of its own apps, such as Google Docs, to the Kotlin Multiplatform. It recommended using the platform for sharing business logic between platforms, as well. After Google’s layoffs among its Flutter staff, it’s been theorized that Kotlin has won the battle and Flutter will diminish. Currently, 2 million developers use Kotlin, according to JetBrains.

Slint Updates With New Python Packages

Slint 1.6 was released this month with new Python packages. Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit for building native user interfaces for Rust, C++ or JavaScript apps.

This update also includes improvements to the interactive design mode: Users can now drag and drop to create new layouts without code. The Design Mode in live preview displays green drop zones to help users with exact placement for new and existing widgets, the company said in the release notes.

Slint for Python Alpha Packages allows developers to add Slint to a Python project without compilation. Developers simply need to install Slint’s binary packages for Windows, macOS and Linux:

Pip install slint

This release also includes several accessibility improvements. Among these is the ability “for accessibility frameworks to trigger custom actions, such as incrementing the value of a spin box or setting the value of a text input field,” the company said.

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