This Week I Learned: 2023W04

Ara

I talked last week about PXP, a PHP Superset written in Rust. It seems another competitor is Ara. Also written in Rust, also a Superset. It seems less advanced, but I will also keep an eye on it.

PHP

I didn’t catch this information but, in PHP 7.4, appeared an underscore numeric separator.

This means these lines of code are equivalent (the same feature already existed in Python):

$a = 1_234_567;
$b = 1234567;

$a === $b; // true

CSS

I discovered the :is pseudo-class in CSS. Quite convenient.

These are equivalent:

is(.cls-1, .cls-2, .cls-3) p {
  color: teal;
}

.cls-1 p,
.cls-2 p,
.cls-3 p {
  color: teal;
}

Found here.

Astro

Astro 2.0 is out. It introduces type safety for Markdown and MDX files, which sounds quite exciting. I have not migrated this blog to the new version yet, but I will do it soon.

Kodezi

I discovered Kodezi, an AI tool acting like Grammarly but for code. It can explain what your code does, translate it into another language, and optimize it. Didn’t try it yet. It has a personal Web IDE or a VS Code extension.