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NativeScript 6.3 - The Holiday Edition

December 19, 2019 — by Emil Tabakov

It’s a wrap! Our final release for 2019 is here. It’s meant to make your development experience faster and smoother.

New Optional CSS Parser

6.3 brings a brand new CSS Parser, which provides up to 30% faster startup time according to our tests. This parser is already the default one in the next versions of the framework.

Faster CLI Commands

Prior to this release, every command was making sure that the environment is set up correctly before doing its job (similar to executing tns doctor). You can bet that this is a costly overhead and we decided to cache this result and reuse for every consequent operation, until the environment is changed. This should make every command 10-12s faster.

HMR working with the nativescript-worker-loader package

Up to now, all application that were using the nativescript-worker-loader package (either directly or as a dependency) couldn’t benefit from the HMR functionality for various technical reasons. This will no longer be the case and the usage of this plugin will not impose any restrictions on the developer experience.

Scoped Packages Independent from the Regular Ones

In 6.3, developers can use the scoped packages like @nativescript/core, @nativescript/angular, etc. without the need to install the older packages as well. Those are now entirely independent implementations.

Svelte.js Support in the Playground

We are always trilled the community does something cool and we always try to showcase this work as much as possible. David Pershouse has been working tirelessly to provide a solid story for developing mobile applications with Svelte using NativeScript. We are happy to offer this as a starting point of your projects in the NativeScript Playground.

Community Contributions

Some cool PRs by the community got merge in this release as well:

  • edusperoni added requestAnimationFrame as a supported function
  • slolam added width and height properties to the dialog for sizing purposes

Others

We did some maintenance tasks like:

  • Update the version of V8 to 7.8.279.19
  • Update the version for JSCore to 13.2
  • Provide support for Node.js 13