fidzu : java

#​749 - August 22, 2025

Read on the Web

☀️ We're back after a week off, though I'm starting to think we should have taken two weeks off as it's been quite quiet in JavaScript-land this August! Nevertheless, we still have a full issue for you today, so let's get on to it.. ;-)
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Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

Eliminating JavaScript Cold Starts on AWS Lambda - Porffor is a rapidly developing ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler with a major benefit being extremely quick process launch times (think sub-millisecond). This is certainly more a taste of the future, and something to experiment with, rather than something you want to imminently deploy into production.

Oliver Medhurst

Rspack Introduces Rslint, a Fast Linter Written in Go - A high-performance JavaScript and TypeScript linter written in Go, and the newest member of the Rspack/Rstack family of tools.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

💡 In related news, the Rust-powered Oxlint linter has unveiled a preview of type-aware linting support. Oxlint and Rslint (or Biome) are worth investigating if you're having performance issues with ESLint.

Front-End System Design: Build Scalable UIs - Learn browser rendering, DOM performance, state, and UI optimization with real-world exercises.

Frontend Masters sponsor

jQuery 4.0.0 Release Candidate 1 - Version 4.0 of jQuery has reached the "we think this is ready; now poke it with many sticks" stage. While jQuery is still heavily used, we know it's old-fashioned, but it was so important in the early days of JavaScript Weekly that we have a major soft spot for it!

Timmy Willison

Reflections on the React Community - Lee, formerly of Vercel and widely recognized for his influence on Next.js and React, shares candid reflections on the React community, digging into the rise of React Server Components, the tension between commercial and non-commercial priorities, the toll of burnout, and a reminder that, above all, this is still a community of people.

Lee Robinson

IN BRIEF:

• Minification Benchmarks is a frequently updated benchmark of different JavaScript minifiers, with cminify being the newest addition.

• 🕹️ The latest js13kGames competition is underway. Submissions are due by September 13.

• 🎤 Evan You, creator of Vue.js, went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about Vue and its ongoing development.

• Dr. Axel Rauschmayer is taking a break from his deeper technical articles to produce a series of articles for beginners - he's already covered JavaScript numbers, variables, and functions, strings and methods, and arrays.

RELEASES:

• React Native 0.81 - Say hi to Android 16 support and precompiled iOS builds.

• Next.js 15.5 - Turbopack builds in beta and stable Node.js middleware.

• Bun v1.2.20 - Now with reduced idle CPU usage. v1.3 due soon.

• Astro 5.13 , ESLint v9.33.0, Fastify 5.5, pnpm 10.15, Biome 2.2

📖 Articles and Videos

Using the Custom Highlight API - The CSS Custom Highlight API offers a way to style text ranges on a document using JavaScript to create the ranges, and CSS to style them. And, as of Firefox 140, all major browsers now support it. This could be great for in-page search or even dynamic syntax highlighting.

Chris Coyier

The Power of the Intl API: A Definitive Guide to Browser-Native Internationalization - Instead of relying on heavy third-party libraries, modern browsers provide JavaScript with the Intl API - a powerful, native way to handle internationalization.

Fuqiao Xue

The Best Way for Web Developers to Track Key User Flows - Check out User Journeys, a new approach to connecting technical performance to user engagement in your web apps.

Embrace sponsor

Designing Chrome's Built-in AI Web APIs - Domenic, a member of the Chrome team at Google, shares some insights into how the APIs around Chrome's newest AI features were designed.

Domenic Denicola

▶ React Mock Interview: Three Devs Take on a Challenge - Three top developers take on the same React challenge to build a form complete with validation. If you've got the time for a 50 minute video, this is fun and educational.

Shruti Kapoor

📄 How Incorrect Shopify Webhook Parsing Led to Database Deletion - A sneaky problem with an unexpected undefined value being fed to Prisma. One of Prisma's validation errors did pick it up, however. Ingressr

📄 The Problems with Modals, and How to Solve Them in Vue.js Noel De Martin

📄 How Bun Made postMessage 500x Faster Jarred Sumner

📄 The Future of JavaScript: What Awaits Us JSDev

🛠 Code & Tools

Uppy 5.0: A Powerful, Modular JavaScript File Uploader - Upload not just from local sources (whether files or a webcam) but also remote services like Dropbox or Google Drive. Integrates with frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, and Angular, and supports resumable uploads too. GitHub repo.

Transloadit

😄 Faceclick: A Lightweight Emoji Picker with Keyword Search - Includes some interesting details on how it was made more efficient.

Dave Gauer

Secure Your AI Agents So That You Can Protect Your Users - Whether you have a B2B or B2C use case, Auth0 is a full IdP that provides robust security like MFA and continuous threat monitoring.

Auth0 sponsor

Sidequest.js: A New Scalable Job Execution Option for Node.js - A scalable background job processor for Node apps that includes a Web-based dashboard, the ability to support multiple backends, and TS-first ergonomics. GitHub repo.

Merencia and Guizzo

Minecraft MCP Server: Let an LLM Take Control of Minecraft - A fun way to play around with MCP servers and LLMs. It uses Mineflayer, a JavaScript API for creating Minecraft bots, behind the scenes. The video in the README is cool, showing how Claude and this server can turn a photo of the White House into an in-world creation.

Yuniko Software

• Waku 0.25 - The minimal React framework introduces the concept of 'slice components' - a new approach to fine-grained component rendering.

• Retire.js 5.3 - A security scanning tool to detect the use of JavaScript libraries with known vulnerabilities in your project.

• Ky 1.9 - Simple HTTP client based upon Fetch for browsers, Node & Deno.

• Repomix 1.3 - Pack an entire repository into a single, LLM-friendly file.

• 🗓️ React Date Picker 8.6 - Simple date picker component. (Demo.)

• Flatbush 4.5 - Fast static spatial index for 2D points and rectangles.

• plotly.js 3.1 - Standalone data visualization library.

• Chai 6.0 - BDD / TDD assertion framework.

🎁 Some Bonus Items

• SmallJS is a Smalltalk-80 implementation that compiles to JavaScript. v1.7 has just been released with support for creating desktop apps using NW.js.

• 🏎️ Ryan Skinner presents Rari, a demonstration of replacing Node.js with a Rust-powered backend for rendering React server components, and shows off some serious performance improvements.

• 🚴 Harry Roberts analyzed the performance of the sites for each team in the Tour de France - it's interesting to see some of the things he noticed.

• If you use AWS at all, this list of 'AWS stuff you think you know that's now wrong' from Corey Quinn is an eye-opener.

• /^a(1,3)/ == /^(a|aa|aaa)/? A regex equivalence checker.

#​748 - August 8, 2025

Read on the Web

☀️ We're taking next week off, so this will be the last issue until Friday, August 22. Just a little summer vacation.
__
Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

Apache ECharts 6.0: The Powerful Data Visualization Library - 12 years on from its first release, ECharts takes another big step forward. Visualization types span from line, bar and pie charts to 3D graphs, calendars and Sankey diagrams. v6 brings an all-new design language, dynamic theme switching, dark mode support, even more chart types, and more. Be sure to enjoy the 100+ demos and the GitHub repo.

Apache Software Foundation

Add Excel-like Spreadsheet Functionality to Your JavaScript Apps - SpreadJS is the industry-leading JavaScript spreadsheet for adding advanced spreadsheet features to your enterprise apps. Build finance, analysis, budget, and other apps. Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, tables, charts, and more. View demos now.

SpreadJS from MESCIUS inc sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.9 - One of TypeScript's gentlest steps forward, with support for import defer, --module node20, and 'expandable hovers' (below) to see expanded type information in IDEs. We also learn v6.0 will act as a 'transition point' to get prepared for the Go-powered 'native port' of TypeScript due to arrive as TypeScript 7.0.

Microsoft

💡 The latest version of VS Code has also just landed with TypeScript 5.9 included and offering the 'expandable hovers' feature, explained in more depth here.

⚖️ Oracle's Latest Move in the JavaScript™ Trademark Case - Oracle's latest response to Deno's petition to cancel the JavaScript trademark includes a denial of the assertion that "there is broad industry and public consensus that the term 'JavaScript' is generic." We've been told!

United States Patent and Trademark Office

IN BRIEF:

• Sarah Gooding gives an update on the latest proposal advancements at TC39, including Math.sumPrecise, Uint8Array/base64 conversion functions, and Iterator.concat.

• A mega roundup of What's New in Viteland covering a variety of Vite ecosystem projects including Vite 7, Rolldown, Oxlint, and Vitest.

• SvelteKit has added an experimental remote functions feature - server-side functions that can be called from anywhere within the SvelteKit app.

• Vercel now natively supports the deployment of Hono apps. Hono is a lightweight, cross-runtime webapp framework.

📖 Articles and Videos

▶ How JavaScript Really Evolves: Inside TC39 with Daniel Ehrenberg - A well-recorded 47 minute in-person conversation with one of the most productive members of the TC39 committee covering not just some of the newest features coming to JavaScript, but also the way TC39 works and how you can get involved and propose ideas and help the language move forward.

The Weekly Dev's Brew

💬 It's very rough, but for accessibility, I've put the raw YouTube transcript in this gist, if you can't watch the video. You can also listen and subscribe in podcast form here.

How V8's JSON.stringify Got Over 2x Faster - The V8 team has turbo-charged JSON.stringify, giving apps an automatic performance boost for numerous common tasks when using V8 13.8 onwards (such as in Chrome 138). This article unpacks the low-level work behind the speedup.

Patrick Thier (V8)

Level Up Your Auth for Not Only Your Users, but Also Your AI Agents - Auth0 is a full IdP that provides robust security and control over the user experience, from sign-up flows to advanced authorization.

Auth0 sponsor

"JavaScript Isn't the Problem, Replacing the Browser Was" - The creator of RedwoodSDK, a React framework for building server-side apps on Cloudflare, suggests SPA-style development was a compromise to work around platform limitations, and now a server-first approach makes good sense.

Peter Pistorius

📄 Building Bluesky Comments for My Blog - A neat idea, and might give you some ideas of your own. Natalie B

📄 What We Learned From Creating PostCSS Andrey Sitnik (Evil Martians)

📄 Introducing Stan: A New State Management Library for TypeScript Rafał Krupiński

📄 A Few Things About the Anchor Element's href You Might Not Have Known Jim Nielsen

📺 tRPC vs oRPC: A Typesafe API Battle Jack Herrington

🛠 Code & Tools

MathJax v4.0: A JS Display Engine for Math in Browsers - Several years in the making, MathJax reasserts its position as one of the best Web-based math rendering approaches. There is, of course, a live demo. v4.0 adds more fonts, a better default font, line-breaking support, ESM support, and much more.

Cervone, Sorge, et al.

Panda CSS 1.0: Modern, Build-Time, Type-Safe CSS-in-JS - A DX-focused CSS-in-JS approach from the creator of Chakra UI that offers build-time generated styles and type safety out of the box. It works with Remix, Vite, Next.js, Astro, and even server components.

Segun Adebayo

The Best Way for Web Developers to Track Key User Flows - Check out User Journeys, a new approach to connecting technical performance to user engagement in your web apps.

Embrace sponsor

zx v8.8: Write Better Shell Scripts with Node.js - A popular way to make shell scripting a more pleasant experience in Node with useful wrappers around child_process, argument escaping, and sensible defaults. v8.8 improves zx's piping story. (Docs.)

Google

🔊 React Native Audio API - Get the power and flexibility of the Web Audio API in your React Native apps, whether on iOS, Android or the Web. It's explained in much more detail in this blog post.

Software Mansion

• eslint-plugin-angular 5.0 - ESLint plugin for AngularJS applications, now with ESLint v9 support.

• Ghost 6.0 - Node.js-powered indie publishing and blogging platform.

• Joi 18.0 - Schema description language and data validator.

• 📈 Fuite 5.0.8 - Tool for finding memory leaks in web apps.

🎁 Some Bonus Items

• AwesomeIndex (above) provides a way to search hundreds of 'awesome'-style curated link lists at once. This idea has a lot of potential, as those lists are crammed full of useful resources.

• r2dec-js is a JavaScript-based decompiler that converts assembly code into 'pseudo-C' for learning purposes.

• Bali is an attempt at creating a JavaScript lexer, parser, and interpreter in the Nim language.

• 👀 Do you miss ActionScript 3.0 and Flex? No? This week, I learned Apache is keeping the dream alive with Apache Royale.

• 🤖 You probably heard that OpenAI released GPT-5, but their developer-oriented intro to GPT-5 was overshadowed, I think, and it goes into some interesting depth. They dropped two open weight models too.

• Today I learned that JSON has a logo.

We're now off for a week, so will be back on Friday, August 22 - see you then!

✈️ #​747 - August 1, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview - The Observable Framework and the new Notebook Kit are just two parts of a rich ecosystem of reactive JavaScript 'notebook'-style tools for creating data visualizations (example) and dashboards, originally created by Mike Bostock. This v2 release previews a big step forward with a new notebook file format based on HTML and, for the first time, support for true vanilla JavaScript, complete with the ability to import libraries with import. Here's another neat example showing off the potential. There are a lot of parts here, so dig in.

Observable, Inc.

CodeRabbit's Free AI Code Reviews in IDE - VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf - Code Rabbit brings AI code reviews to VS Code, Cursor & Windsurf. Get line-by-line reviews, one-click fixes & codebase-aware feedback - all free in your IDE. Seamlessly integrates with git workflows. Install the extension & start reviewing!

CodeRabbit sponsor

The Many JavaScript Runtimes of the Last Decade - A fantastic, well-researched look at the myriad of JavaScript runtimes and engines both past and present, from mainstream picks like Node.js and Bun, to cloud platforms and some more obscure 'honorable mentions'. A perfect way to round out your knowledge of JavaScript's runtime story.

Whatever, Jamie

Node.js v22.18 (LTS) Gets Type Stripping by Default - We wouldn't normally feature a minor Node.js LTS release, but this one comes with a big tweak: type stripping/TypeScript support is enabled by default, making node app.ts a reality, much as with Bun or Deno.

Antoine du Hamel

💡 Node v24.5 (Current) has also been released, with node:http(s) now supporting proxies, OpenSSL 3.5, and --experimental-wasm-modules unflagged.

IN BRIEF:

• 🕹️ LLM whisperer Simon Willison shows off how he used the new GLM-4.5 Air model running locally on his MacBook Pro to implement a JavaScript 'Space Invaders' game in one shot. You can play it here.

• npm now lets you securely publish npm packages from CI/CD workflows using OpenID Connect (OIDC) for authentication.

• 📊 The Stack Overflow 2025 survey results are out, and JavaScript sits at #1 in the most used languages, React holds the top frontend library spot, with jQuery at number two.

• Tailwind Plus has added support for vanilla JavaScript - no Vue or React needed.

RELEASES:

• ⭐ pnpm 10.14 - The alternative, efficient package manager adds the ability to declare a Node.js, Deno or Bun version in package.json and have it installed and pinned automatically.

• Node-RED 4.1 - Powerful JS-based low-code flow-based platform for building event-driven apps.

• Ionic 8.7 - Cross-platform mobile app development framework.

• Storybook 9.1 - Frontend component and UI workshop.

• TypeScript 5.9 RC - The final release is imminent (most likely later today).

• ESLint v9.32.0, Preact 10.27, Angular 20.1.4, Deno 2.4.3, React 19.1.1

📖 Articles and Videos

▶ Zod vs. Valibot: A JS/TS Validator Battle - You know it's good when the creator of Zod comments: "incredible video. honestly blown away by how succinct and clear you made everything." (12 minutes.)

Jack Herrington

Compile Svelte 5 in Your Head - Svelte does things a little differently to most UI frameworks by compiling code to components ahead-of-time, but what is it actually doing at the code level?

Tan Li Hau

Choosing The Right SaaS Architecture: Multi-Tenant Vs. Single-Tenant - Choosing between multi-tenant and single-tenant? This guide breaks down the tradeoffs clearly.

Clerk sponsor

Logical Assignment Operators in JavaScript: Small Syntax, Big Wins - A handy post if you need to get a grip on your ||=, &&= and ??=s.

Matt Smith

Making Sense of the Performance Extensibility API - The Performance Extensibility API allows us to create custom tracks in Chrome DevTools' Performance panel - here's how to make use of it.

Harry Roberts

📺 The Creator of Bun on Building Bun and its Node.js Compatibility Patrick Akil and Jarred Sumner

📄 The Multi-Repository TypeScript Problem - Solving cross-repo type safety. David Moores

📄 vi.mock is a Footgun: Why vi.spyOn Should Be Your Default Brendan McLoughlin

📄 How to Build 2D Game-Style Physics with Matter.js and React Native Skia Daniel Friyia (Expo Blog)

🛠 Code & Tools

Dependency Cruiser 17: A Way to Visualize Dependencies - If you want a look at the output, there's a whole page of graphs for popular, real world projects including Chalk, Yarn, and React.

Sander Verweij

TanStack DB: The Embedded Client Database for TanStack Query - One for team React! TanStack DB is an embedded client‑side database that uses differential dataflow to power live, relational queries, sub‑ms incremental updates, and optimistic writes. This post is a great pitch, and the first beta is available now.

Kyle Mathews and Sam Willis

Connect Performance and Reliability to User Engagement - With Embrace, see where technical issues cause dropoff, along with attribute correlations to surface affected cohorts.

Embrace sponsor

AudioTee.js: macOS System Audio Capture for Node.js - Wrapping around an (included) Swift-powered binary, this captures Mac system audio output and emits it as PCM encoded chunks at regular intervals. GitHub repo.

Nick Payne

• Ghost 6.0 RC - The popular Node.js-powered blogging / publishing platform approaches its next major release.

• Ink 6.1 - Use React to build CLI apps, as used by Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and many other apps.

• Cytoscape.js 3.33 - Graph theory/network visualization and analysis library.

• eslint-plugin-vue 10.4 - Official ESLint plugin for Vue.js. (Homepage.)

• Axios 1.11 - Long-standing, promise-based isomorphic HTTP client.

• InversifyJS 7.7 - Lightweight inversion of control container.

🎁 Some Bonus Items

• Google has unveiled a new open-licensed code font called Google Sans Code. It has a 'soft' feel to it and is inspired by Google's branding. It's available on Google Fonts too, if you want to quickly plug it into a site.

• NPKILL is a popular tool for digging into, and cleaning up, those heavy node_modules folders you've accumulated. v1.0 is nearly here and its author is thinking about how it could be extended to cleaning up other types of clutter.

• Pete Matsyburka demonstrates how just a few lines of code can make sites load faster, thanks to the Speculation Rules API (currently only supported by Chromium-based browsers).

• Got a big JavaScript project that needs some serious attention from someone experienced? npm creator Isaac Z. Schlueter is available for hire.

• 📺 If you've never thought about what might go into making a text editor, ▶️ Computerphile's latest video will be an eye opener.

• I have to admire someone who builds their blog using C preprocessor macros.