fidzu : javascript

#​771 - February 3, 2026

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JavaScript Weekly

Four Heavyweights Drop Updates

Four stalwarts of the JavaScript ecosystem all shipped notable releases this week, and odds are you're using at least one of them:

• Gatsby v5.16 proves Gatsby, once considered neck-and-neck with Next.js in the React world, is not 'dead'. The headline feature is React 19 support.

• Babel 7 just shipped its final release. "After years in the making, Babel 8 is finally ready," in release candidate form, at least.

• Rspress 2.0 is a major release for the high-performance Rust-powered, but JavaScript-facing, static site generator.

• Lodash 4.17.23 sounds minor, but it's a 'security reset' for the still heavily used utility library and is designed to provide a base for a longer future.

Only Fools Write Tests - Modern engineering teams like Notion, Dropbox, Wiz, and LaunchDarkly use Meticulous to maintain E2E UI tests that cover every edge case of your web app.

Meticulous sponsor

🦀 OpenClaw: The Runaway AI Assistant - An intense week for a new open source TypeScript project: 150k stars on GitHub, hordes buying Mac Minis to run it, two rebrands (it was originally Clawdbot), and an ecosystem of projects the agents use autonomously (e.g. an entire social network). Another example of TypeScript at the heart of the AI boom.

Peter Steinberger

IN BRIEF:

• The popular JSBin collaborative JavaScript pastebin went down for a few days and Remy Sharp shares the war story of what happened.

• 🔒 The OpenJS Foundation has shared an annual report covering its efforts in securing the JS ecosystem.

• Angular is changing components' default change detection strategy.

• Both Astro and Svelte have shared monthly roundups of what's new.

RELEASES:

• Node.js v25.6.0 (Current) - async_hooks can now skip Promise hooks to reduce overhead. Plus, URL parsing now supports Unicode 17.

• jQuery UI 1.14.2 - The legacy UI library gets its first update in over a year and now works with jQuery 4.0.

• Bun v1.3.8 - Say hello to native Markdown parsing.

• Astro 5.17, ESLint 10.0.0-rc2, tRPC v11.9.0, Lexical 0.40.0, Reka UI 2.8 (formerly Radix Vue)

📖 Articles and Videos

⁉️ How Not to Parse Numbers in JavaScript - Why use a proper locale-aware API to parse numbers when you can hand-roll a maze of string splits, separator swaps, and implicit type coercions that silently break on edge cases?

Remy Porter (The Daily WTF)

📉 Node.js 16 to 25 Benchmarked Version-by-Version - The jumps in performance in various areas are striking (with Node 25, especially), with other areas getting more modest gains.

RepoFlow

A Practical Checklist for B2B Enterprise Readiness - Measure gaps in auth, admin UX, security, monitoring, and architecture for landing enterprise customers. Download today!

Descope sponsor

Explicit Resource Management in JavaScript - You can use using for deterministic cleanup, calling Symbol.dispose/asyncDispose at scope exit without try/finally. A small fix for leaks and forgotten teardowns in streams, observers, locks, and similar APIs.

Matt Smith

The History of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg - GitHub interviewed the creator of both C# and TypeScript about his career, why TypeScript was created in the first place, some internal Microsoft politics, as well as the ongoing Go port of the TypeScript compiler. There's a video of the full interview, as well as 'seven learnings' boiled down in written form.

GitHub

📄 My Opinionated ESLint Setup for Vue Projects - Packed with examples to pick and choose from. Alexander Opalic

📄 A Scroll-Revealed WebGL Gallery with GSAP, Three.js, Astro and Barba.js - Striking visual image reveal effect with a live demo. Chakib Mazouni

📄 Predicting Math.random() in Firefox Using Z3 SMT-Solver Dennis Yurichev

🎤 Securing npm is Table Stakes Nicholas C. Zakas (Changelog Podcast)

📄 Building a Simple RSS Aggregator with Astro Raymond Camden

🛠 Code & Tools

Heat.js 5.0: A Flexible Heat Map Rendering Solution - Generate customized interactive heatmaps (think GitHub contributions graph), or render heatmaps as lines and bar charts. The site is packed with demos to enjoy. GitHub repo.

William Troup

Building an MCP Server? Don't Roll Your Own Auth - WorkOS AuthKit handles OAuth 2.1 flows so your MCP server just verifies tokens. Control which tools AI agents access.

WorkOS sponsor

🕒 Croner 10.0: Cron-Style Triggers and Evaluation - Trigger functions on any cron schedule using cron syntax. It can also evaluate cron expressions to give you a list of upcoming times. v10.0 brings full OCPS (Open Cron Pattern Specification) 1.4 compliance and even more scheduling options.

Hexagon

🗓️ DayFlow: A Full Calendar Component for React - A React-only feature-rich calendar component with drag-and-drop, multiple views, and all the usual GCal-style richness. Its infinite scrolling feature is nifty. GitHub repo.

DayFlow Contributors

Tsonic: A TypeScript to C# Transpiler - The idea is for creating native executables that run on .NET. I've not tested it as I'm not in that ecosystem but it's an interesting idea.

Jeswin

• 📄 EmbedPDF 2.4 - Framework-agnostic JavaScript PDF viewer. (Demo.)

• JavaScriptKit v0.40 - Swift framework for interacting with JS via WASM.

• StackBlur.js 3.0 - Long-standing Gaussian blur library; now using ESM.

• Knip 5.83 - Finds and fixes unused files, dependencies and exports.

• 📄 jsPDF 4.1 - Generate PDFs directly in JavaScript. (Demo.)

• qrcode.vue 3.8 - Vue.js component to generate QR codes.

• focus-trap 8.0 - Trap focus within a DOM node. (Demo.)

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• GitHub is exploring solutions to tackle low-quality contributions, which could include giving you the option to disable PRs entirely or at least restrict them to collaborators. Got opinions? Join the discussion.

• How to throttle individual network requests in Chrome, rather than at a global level. Ideal for testing what happens when your dependencies load very slooooooowwwwwly....

• 🤖 OpenAI has released a desktop version of its agentic-coding Codex app. macOS only for now, though someone used Codex to port itself to Linux.. 😂

• ⚠️ If you're a Windows user using the popular Notepad++ editor, you might want to double check your install as the project suffered a suspected state-sponsored hijack in 2025.

• svelteesp32 is a curious project for embedding Svelte, React, Angular or Vue frontends into ESP32 microcontroller apps.

#​770 - January 27, 2026

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JavaScript Weekly

Introducing LibPDF: PDF Parsing and Generation from TypeScript - LibPDF bills itself as 'the PDF library TypeScript deserves' and supports parsing, modifying, signing and generating PDFs with a modern API in Node, Bun, and the browser. GitHub repo.

Documenso

JavaScript Frameworks - Heading into 2026 - The creator of SolidJS knows more than a thing or two about JS frameworks and has written an annual review of the scene for the past few years. Here, he picks on four areas of evolution, and says it's "an incredibly exciting time to be working on JavaScript frameworks."

Ryan Carniato

Still Writing Tests Manually? - Notion, Dropbox, Wiz, and LaunchDarkly have found a new testing paradigm - and they can't imagine working without it. Built by ex-Palantir engineers, Meticulous autonomously creates a continuously evolving suite of E2E UI tests that delivers near-exhaustive coverage with zero developer effort.

Meticulous AI sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• Lea Verou has celebrated getting two ECMAScript proposals she's championed to stage 1 at TC39 this week: Composable Accessors and Alias Accessors. Rob Palmer also shares more proposal updates from the latest TC39 plenary.

• 🕹️ The creator of Three.js (known as mrdoob) has created a Three.js-powered port of 1996's Quake - here's the source. You can learn more about this project in this X thread.

• 📊 JSBenchmarks.com is a fresh attempt to benchmark several popular JavaScript frameworks. As always with benchmarks, use a critical eye, but the example apps are open to read or contribute to.

RELEASES:

• Node.js 25.5.0 (Current) - Introduces a --build-sea option that simplifies the process of building single executable applications.

• Bun v1.3.7 - The popular runtime updates its JavaScriptCore engine, leading to 35% faster async/await and ARM64 perf improvements. It also lands a new option to generate profiling data in Markdown format for easier sharing, plus native JSON5 and JSONL parsing support.

• Rolldown 1.0 RC - Fast Rust-based bundler with a Rollup-compatible API and esbuild feature parity.

• npm v11.8.0, Emscripten 5.0, Neutralinojs 6.5.0

📖 Articles and Videos

Porting 100k Lines from TypeScript to Rust in a Month - A prolific JavaScript developer ported a Pokémon battle simulator to Rust and shares his experiences and techniques used to work around issues where Claude Code would get bogged down in such a large task. He notes "LLM-based coding agents are such a great new tool" but require "engineering expertise and constant babysitting".

Christopher Chedeau

Building a JavaScript Runtime in One Month - "What if I could build a JavaScript engine small enough to embed in a C program, but complete enough to actually run real code?" The end result is Ant.

theMackabu

Clerk MCP Server for AI Coding Assistants - Connect Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to Clerk's docs. Get working auth code instead of outdated patterns.

Clerk sponsor

Inside Turbopack: Building Faster by Building Less - If you're working on a large codebase, faster hot reloading, better scaling, and persistent caching are all quite desirable. Here's how these things came about in Turbopack.

Shew, Woodruff and Koppers (Vercel)

▶ Bun Explained in 100 Seconds - The popular quick dev explainer channel tackles Bun at a high level.

Fireship

📄 Fixing a 6-Year-Old JavaScript Memory Leak in a Google Cloud Function Matt Zeunert (DebugBear)

📄 Build a Dinosaur Runner Game with Deno, Part 4 - The fourth part of an ongoing series on the official Deno blog. Jo Franchetti

📄 Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare: Serverless Cold Starts Compared Punit Sethi

📄 SPAs are a Performance Dead End Yegor Bugayenko

🛠 Code & Tools

Midscene.js: Remote Control for the Web, Mobile and Desktop Using Vision Models - Provides a way to drive numerous platforms from JavaScript (including iOS) by using various integrations and a vision-capable model so you can write actions in a mixture of JavaScript and natural language and have them performed.

ByteDance Inc.

🔄 Travels 1.0: A Fast, Framework-Agnostic Undo/Redo Library - Allows you to add undo/redo functionality to apps like text editors, drawing tools, or other interactive software. Uses a memory efficient technique only storing changes, rather than full snapshots for each change.

Mutative

The #1 Time-Series Database Built on Postgres - TimescaleDB extends Postgres with hypertables, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates. Start building for free.

Tiger Data sponsor

SonicJS 2.7: Perf-Focused Edge-Native Headless CMS for Cloudflare Workers - A production-ready CMS built specifically for the edge. GitHub repo.

SonicJS Team

🤖 Mastra 1.0: An AI Framework from the Former Gatsby Team - An all-in-one framework (homepage) for building AI-powered apps and agents.

Sam Bhagwat

• Storybook 10.2 - The frontend workshop for building UI components gets some UI and story authoring improvements.

• 🎥 Mediabunny 1.31.0 - Media toolkit for reading, writing, and converting video and audio files, directly in the browser.

• Cheerio v1.2 - Fast, flexible HTML and XML parser and DOM manipulation library.

• eslint-plugin-regexp 3.0 - Plugin for finding regex mistakes and style violations.

• React Timeline Editor 1.0 - Component to build timeline-based editors. (Examples.)

• 📊 Billboard.js 3.18.0 - Flexible JavaScript chart library based on D3.js.

• Feedsmith 2.9 - Feed parser and generator for popular feed formats.

• Typed.js v3.0 - Typing animation library. (GPL licensed.)

• Regle v1.17 - Headless form validation library for Vue.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• OpenAI's Michael Bolin wrote a thorough technical review of how its OpenAI Codex agent works. Invaluable reading for anyone trying to implement their own coding agent or even if you just want to know how they do their thing.

• 🕹️ A group of developers has ported Super Monkey Ball to the Web. Here's the source if you're intrigued - it has surprisingly few dependencies.

• Mystral Native.js is an early-stage experimental runtime for running JavaScript games natively using WebGPU: "Think of it as 'Electron for games' but without Chromium."

• Miss using telnet to connect to remote services? There are still some text-based services you can access.

• How to Favicon in 2026: Three files that fit most needs

#​769 - January 20, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

jQuery 4.0 Released - 20 years on from its original release, the ever-popular (in terms of actual usage) library reaches 4.0 with a migration to ES modules (compatible with modern build tools) along with dropping support for IE 10 and older. With jQuery being a popular guest in our newsletters in the early years, it's fantastic to see it pop back for a quick visit.

Timmy Willison

💡 If you're using jQuery, you'll find jQuery Migrate, an official tool to help you upgrade, useful. jQuery in 2026 is a somewhat legacy choice, though, and you might not need jQuery at all..

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

Astro is Joining Cloudflare - Big news in the Web framework space as the team behind the popular Astro framework (the beta of v6.0 is now available) is headed to Cloudflare. Few major frameworks are now not under the wing of a larger entity.

Schott and Irvine-Broque

IN BRIEF:

• 🕒 Temporal Playground is an online sandbox for playing around with the Temporal API.

• Svelte has released patches for five vulnerabilities affecting the Svelte ecosystem.

• 🤖 Ryan Dahl, creator of both Node.js and Deno, says on X that "the era of humans writing code is over" and "That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it." I hope not, but these are interesting times!

RELEASES:

• Electron 40.0 - The popular cross-platform desktop app framework upgrades to Chromium 144, V8 14.4, and Node 24.11.1.

• Node.js v25.4.0 (Current) - require(esm) is now marked as stable.

• React Native Windows 0.81, Aurelia 2 RC, Deno 2.6.5

📖 Articles and Videos

ASCII Characters Are Not Pixels: A Deep Dive Into ASCII Rendering - Alex digs deep into getting ASCII-based graphics rendering just right with JavaScript, complete with examples of the algorithms used and numerous demos. The neatest technical blog post I've seen so far this year.

Alex Harri

JavaScript Now a First-Class Citizen in Aspire - Aspire is a Microsoft framework for orchestrating the deployment of distributed apps. Originally just for .NET, Aspire 13 now makes JavaScript a first-class citizen, so you can run Vite and full-stack JS apps with service discovery, telemetry, and production-ready containers.

Microsoft

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future - 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Introducing the <geolocation> Element - Chrome 144 introduces a new <geolocation> element for requesting user location data, moving away from a JavaScript-triggered prompt.

Viana, Le, Steiner

📄 Bootstrapping Bun - "My journey running the build system for Bun … without relying on any of its usual binary dependencies - namely itself." Bradley Walters

📄 Building a Scroll-Driven Dual-Wave Text Animation with GSAP Valentin Descombes

📄 How the Electron Team Improved Window Resize Behavior Niklas Wenzel

📄 How to Learn to Build Apps in 2026 Eric Elliott

🛠 Code & Tools

Starry Night 3.9: GitHub-Like Syntax Highlighting - GitHub's own syntax highlighter isn't open source, but this library is a powerful alternative that tries to get as close as it can, with support for hundreds of languages. I've put a basic Web demo here to show off how to use it on the Web.

Titus Wormer

Extension.js 3: Browser Extension Development Framework - Create cross-browser extensions without manual build configuration and develop, build, and preview across browsers with a unified workflow. GitHub repo.

Cezar Augusto et al.

Easily Add Image Editing to your Web App - Import pintura, give it an image, and instantly get features like cropping, rotating, and annotation. Try for free today.

Pintura sponsor

React Aria: Adobe's World-Class React Components - React Aria has a fantastic new site and all-new documentation that really sells the entire experience, complete with interactive CSS and Tailwind examples to get started quickly.

Adobe

localspace: Modern localForage-Compatible Storage Toolkit - localForage is/was a popular storage library that wrapped various browser storage APIs with a simple, localStorage-like API. It hasn't been updated for years, though, and "localspace exists to bridge that gap".

Michael Lin

• ⭐ p5.js v2.2 - The powerful JavaScript visual/creative coding toolkit now includes WebGPU mode as a core feature (explained well here and here).

• 🎥 Mediabunny 1.29.0 - The TypeScript media toolkit adds support for reading and writing MPEG Transport Stream (.ts) files. Demo site.

• Prettier 3.8 - The opinionated code formatter adds full support for Angular 21.1 which was released last week.

• LogTape 2.0 - Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes. Changelog.

• ☎︎ vue-tel-input 9.6 - Telephone number input for Vue. (Demo.)

• d3-3d 2.0 - D3-powered visualizations, but projected into 3D.

• Convert 6.0 - Small, fast library for type-safe unit conversions.

• SuperDiff 4.0 - Rich readable diffs for arrays and objects.

• Jasmine 6.0 - Long-standing JavaScript BDD framework.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• 🔎 The VS Code team has put together a fascinating blog post about how they implemented a new, fast client-side docs search system for the VS Code site using Rust and WebAssembly. You can use their docfind engine for yourself too, and there's a live demo here showing off how fast it is over an index of 50,000 news articles.

• 📊 HTTP Archive has released its latest Web Almanac for 2025 packed with raw stats, trends, and observations about the state of the Web over the past year, covering areas like WebAssembly, performance, and ever-increasing page weight.

• A developer makes a prediction that Microsoft will eventually discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows-themed Linux distribution.

• Things are not looking good for the MySQL project.

• The State of WebAssembly in 2025 and 2026.