fidzu : javascript

#​767 - January 6, 2026

Read on the Web

🎉 Happy New Year. JavaScript Weekly is now landing in your inboxes on Tuesdays, so here we are! Let's see what 2026 brings.
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

The 2025 JavaScript Rising Stars - At the start of each year, Michael rounds up the projects in the JavaScript ecosystem that gained the most popularity on GitHub in the prior year. After a two-year run of topping the chart, shadcn/ui has been pushed down to #3 by n8n and React Bits. This is a fantastic roundup, now in its tenth(!) year, and features commentary from a few industry experts too.

Michael Rambeau et al.

Make Flaky Tests a Last-Year Problem - Meticulous creates and maintains a continuously evolving E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Built on Chromium with a deterministic engine, it's the only testing tool that eliminates flakes. Relied on by Dropbox, Notion, and Lattice.

Meticulous Ai sponsor

MicroQuickJS: A New JavaScript Engine from Fabrice Bellard - Fabrice, one of the world's most prolific developers well-known for creating FFmpeg, QEMU and QuickJS, is back with a new JavaScript engine targeting embedded systems, and that can run with as little as 10KB of RAM.

Fabrice Bellard

💡 The discussion about MicroQuickJS on Hacker News was particularly rich. Redis's creator, Salvatore Sanfilippo, even noted that Redis would have used JavaScript as its scripting language instead of Lua if this had existed in 2010.

IN BRIEF:

• pnpm's lead maintainer, Zoltan Kochan, presents a look back at how 2025 was a transformative year for the project.

• If you missed our final issue of 2025, be sure to check it out. We did a month-by-month rundown of what happened in the JavaScript world and shared the top ten links of the year.

• WebF is a new WHATWG-compliant web runtime for Flutter so you can build parts of Flutter apps using a more typical JS stack (React, Vue, etc.)

RELEASES:

• pnpm 10.27 - The alternative, efficient (and increasingly security-focused) package manager gets some tweaks, including a setting to ignore trust policy checks for packages published more than a specified time ago.

• Ink 6.6 - Use React to build CLI apps, as used by Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and many others.

• 🎨 Color.js v0.6 - The popular standards-compliant color conversion and manipulation library approaches its eventual 1.0 release.

• Prisma 7.2, Deno 2.6.4

📖 Articles and Videos

How to Compile JavaScript to C with Static Hermes - The creator of Parcel is porting parts of the project to Rust, but this raises some challenges on interoperating with existing JavaScript plugins, especially without a runtime JS interpreter. What about compiling JavaScript to C libraries that can be called directly? It's possible!

Devon Govett

🦖 Build a Dinosaur Runner Game with Deno - An ongoing series of posts (part two and three are also available) on the official Deno blog where you get to recreate something akin to Chrome's Dinosaur Game for yourself.

Jo Franchetti

How CERN Cut Storage by 95% and 40x'd Query Speed with TimescaleDB - Learn how CERN engineers modernized Large Hadron Collider time-series data for performance, scale, and cost efficiency.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Fixing TypeScript Performance Problems: A Case Study - A big monorepo-based TypeScript project was suffering sluggish IntelliSense, long type-checking times, and slow builds, but Solomon's team found some ways to significantly improve things.

Solomon Hawk

Why Object of Arrays (SoA Pattern) Beat Interleaved Arrays - A dive down a JavaScript performance rabbit hole.

Royal Bhati

📄 Brendan Eich Warns Against "Rushed Web UX Over Native" as Windows 11 Leans Harder on WebView2 and Electron Windows Latest

📄 Implementing Streaming JSON in Just 200 Lines of JavaScript Krasimir Tsonev

📄 Signals vs Query-Based Compilers Marvin Hagemeister

📄 The Nine Levels of JavaScript Dependency Hell Andrew Nesbitt

📄 How to Create a Pixel-to-Voxel Video Drop Effect with Three.js and Rapier Junichi Kasahara

🛠 Code & Tools

Schedule-X 3.6: A Material Design Calendar and Date Picker - Available in the form of React/Preact, Vue, Svelte, Angular, or plain JS components. Open source but with a premium version with extra features. GitHub repo.

Tom Österlund

📄 jsPDF 4.0: Client-Side JavaScript PDF Generation - Create tickets, documents, certificates, etc. all on the fly. There's a live demo, as well as thorough documentation.

Parallax

SurveyJS: JavaScript Libraries for Custom Web Forms - Keep full ownership of your data. Build JSON-driven forms in your app without SaaS limitations.

SurveyJS sponsor

Bruno 3.0: An Open-Source HTTP API Client App - There are a lot of 'API client' tools with varying levels of features, but this is open source and entirely built in JavaScript. v3.0 features a complete overhaul of the UI, adds workspaces for grouping things together, and more. GitHub repo.

Bruno Software Inc.

• JoltPhysics.js 1.0 - A popular C++ physics library can now be used from JavaScript thanks to Emscripten. Check out numerous demos here.

• 🎶 ChordSheetJS 13.0 - Library for parsing and formatting chords and chord sheets. (Demo.)

• Middy 7.0 - Node.js middleware engine for AWS Lambda. Now supports Durable Functions.

• PlayCanvas glTF Viewer 5.8 - 3D model viewer supporting glTF 2.0 and PLY.

• k6 1.5 - Modern Go + JavaScript-powered load testing tool. (Homepage.)

• 📊 Recharts 3.6 - Popular D3-powered React charting library.

• NATS.js 3.3 - JavaScript client for the NATS messaging system.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• For years, Mozilla, Apple, and the CSS Working Group have been working to bring "masonry" layouts (as above) natively to CSS. The concept is now called CSS Grid Lanes and here's how it works. You can already try it out in Safari Technology Preview 234.

• Addy Osmani shares 21 valuable lessons from spending 14 years at Google. Good general advice for remaining a competent and engaged engineer over time.

• Andy Pavlo has put together a neat review of what happened in the world of databases in 2025. Simon Willison has a similar review of LLMs in 2025.

• 🤖 Mattias Geniar explains how AI has made web development fun again (for him, at least).

• Ultimate Linux is a curious experiment to build a minimal userspace for Linux entirely in JavaScript.

#​766 - December 19, 2025

Read on the Web

🗓️ As it's the last issue of 2025, a reminder that JavaScript Weekly moves to Tuesdays in January. See you again on January 6, 2026!
__
Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

It's the final issue of the year, so we're going to cover a few new items, then look back at the top links of 2025 (based on reader engagement) and recap what happened in the ecosystem month-by-month this year.

The JavaScript Bundler Grand Prix - Bundlers now sit at the heart of many JavaScript workflows and are sometimes even integrated into runtimes (e.g. Bun's). This piece surveys the landscape and argues the speed wars are mostly over, with the real battle shifting to artifact size and the code that actually ships to users.

Kate Holterhoff

Coding with AI: The Practical Path for JavaScript Devs - Go beyond demos and hype. Learn real AI-powered workflows with JavaScript, from prompt engineering and coding agents to MCP, ML, and production-ready apps.

Frontend Masters sponsor

'I Ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with LLMs in 4.5 Hours' - Prolific AI blogger Simon Willison shares the tale of porting a standards-compliant HTML5 parser (which passes all 9200+ html5lib-tests) from Python to JavaScript using OpenAI's Codex CLI and GPT 5.2. You can play with the end result or check out the code.

Simon Willison

IN BRIEF:

• 🛠️ Dan Abramov shows off his new 'RSC Explorer', a tool for exploring how React Server Components work behind the scenes.

• Cloudflare Workers' Wrangler tool now supports automatic configuration for deploying apps using numerous web frameworks to Workers, including Next.js, Astro, TanStack Start, SvelteKit, and Nuxt.

• picknplace.js offers a fresh take on the idea of drag-and-drop.

• 🤖 OpenAI has revealed its GPT 5.2 Codex model and we learn how two recent React vulnerabilities were discovered with its help.

RELEASES:

• Tesseract.js 7.0 - OCR library to extract text from images; now faster.

• Base UI 1.0 - Elegant React component suite from a strong team.

• Wasp 0.20 - Rails-like framework for React 19, Node & Prisma.

• Graffle 7.4 - JavaScript GraphQL client that runs anywhere.

• Next.js 16.1, Bun 1.3.5, MathJax 4.1, Prisma 7.2

🏆 The Top 10 Links of 2025

1. A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle - Hillel's deceptively simple puzzle - just 14 bytes of code - attracted by far the most attention this year. Despite working with JavaScript for most of its lifespan, I got it wrong!

Hillel Wayne

2. Ecma International Approved ECMAScript 2025: What's New? - Each year, the Ecma General Assembly approves the latest ECMAScript language specification, and you can read the ES2025 spec in full. Better, though, is to enjoy Dr. Axel's succinct explainer.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

MACROSCOPE - Free AI Code Review for Open Source - Free for non-commercial projects. Everyone else: use OSSAI for 50% off your first 2 months.

Macroscope sponsor

3. 'I Think the Ergonomics of Generators is Growing on Me' - If you've never worked with generator functions, this remains a great look at what they are and where they can be useful. Alex notes that "their practicality hasn't exactly caught on" (yet..)

Alex MacArthur

4. How the Web is Using JavaScript - The JavaScript section of this year's HTTP Archive Web Almanac report went into depth on how much JS we're using (and failing to use), the popularity of TypeScript, Web Worker usage, and.. yes, jQuery still dominates!

HTTP Archive

5. Some Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know in 2025 - A quick list post breezing through some more modern areas of JavaScript including iterator helpers, structuredClone(), and set operations.

Suren Enfiajyan

6. How to Keep package.json Under Control - Covers 'dependency hygiene' and ways to keep things under control. Great tips and tool recommendations.

7. A Brief History of JavaScript - This epic timeline of JavaScript's history will remain a go-to resource for years.

8. War Story: The Hardest Bug I Ever Debugged - A former engineer on the Google Docs team told the tale of a bizarre error that afflicted Google Docs ten years ago.

9. Things People Get Wrong About Electron - One of Electron's maintainers defended the technical choices made by the project over the years.

10. Move On to ESM-Only - While you can maintain packages supporting both ESM and CommonJS, Anthony explained why it's finally time to go 'ESM only'.

🗓️ JavaScript in 2025: Month by Month

Let's step through the year and remember the biggest things that happened in JavaScript each month:

JANUARY - At the start of a very productive year for the alternative JS runtime, Bun took a big step forward with Bun 1.2. We also got a big update on progress with Express.js.

FEBRUARY - An epic documentary about Angular was released. The Deno vs Oracle battle over the JavaScript trademark rumbled on. TypeScript 5.8 was a big release for Node developers in particular. Meanwhile, a developer implemented Doom entirely in TypeScript's type system.

MARCH - Babylon.js 8.0, the latest version of Microsoft's epic JavaScript 3D engine, was released, as was Express 5.1.

APRIL - Koa 3.0 was released, a major Node.js collaboration summit took place in Paris, and p5.js 2.0 was released.

MAY - The Remix project had a huge shakeup. The GSAP animation toolkit was made freely available. The Glitch platform announced it was shutting down. The Deno team put together an epic timeline of JavaScript's history and Microsoft released its first preview of its new natively-compiled Go port of TypeScript.

JUNE - Oxlint 1.0 and Vite 7.0 were released. Dr. Axel unveiled the ES2025 edition of his Exploring JavaScript book. Biome v2 became the first type-aware linter that didn't require tsc, and Ecma International approved the ECMAScript 2025 spec.

When LLMs Hit Your Database, Schema Names Aren't Enough - See how adding semantic context to Postgres helps LLMs query data correctly, and boosts SQL accuracy by 27%.

Tiger Data sponsor

JULY - The JS1024 code golfing contest took place, Deno 2.4 was released, and Vercel acquired NuxtLabs.

AUGUST - TypeScript 5.9 and Apache Echarts 6 were released. The jQuery team dropped a release candidate of jQuery 4.0 (we're still waiting for the final release, though).

SEPTEMBER - Mediabunny shook up the media processing scene. Chrome turned 17, and a messy few months for npm package security began with a variety of packages being compromised in a phishing attack. In response, pnpm added support for delayed dependency updates. macOS Tahoe users found Electron apps were laggy due to a change in a private API. The Deno project asked the community for $200k to help with its JavaScript trademark case.

OCTOBER - React Compiler v1.0 was released, as well as Node.js v25.0, and Node.js 24 became the active LTS release. The React team announced the React Foundation and moves to make React's ownership less attached to Meta. Bun 1.3 was released to much fanfare and Evan You announced Vite+. GitHub announced TypeScript had become the platform's #1 language.

NOVEMBER - The now-named Shai Hulud supply chain attack reared its ugly head in a 'version 2' form. The JavaScript Engines Zoo launched to show us just how rich the JS runtime and engine ecosystem is. Google unveiled Angular v21.

DECEMBER - JavaScript turned 30 years old. Microsoft shared an update on TypeScript 7.0 and Deno 2.6 was released. Node.js v24.12.0 (LTS) was also released, finally making type stripping stable in an LTS release.

🎄 This is the final issue of JavaScript Weekly for 2025 - thanks for reading, submitting links, and supporting us! We're going to return on Tuesday, January 6, 2026. See you then! And, if we're really lucky, we might catch up on our inbox packed with submissions by then too... ;-)

#​765 - December 12, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Useful Patterns for Building HTML Tools - In many situations, you don't need a full-on framework to build useful tools; just HTML, JavaScript and CSS in a single file will do the job fine. Simon's become a bit of an expert by rolling out many such tools using LLMs, and shares his process and practices here. More please!

Simon Willison

Why Are the Top AI Companies Choosing SpreadJS? - Because SpreadJS brings a familiar Excel-like UI to JavaScript web apps. Trusted by leading AI innovators and organizations, it empowers devs to build finance, analytics, and more apps with Excel I/O, 500+ calc functions, charts, & more. View demos!

SpreadJS From MESCIUS sponsor

Deno 2.6 Released - The popular alternative runtime introduces a new npx-like tool called dx to run binaries from npm and JSR packages, adds a deno audit tool for identifying vulnerabilities in dependencies, adds more granular control over runtime permissions, implements source phase imports, and more.

Iwańczuk and Jiang (Deno)

IN BRIEF:

• ⚠️ Two more vulnerabilities relating to React Server Components surfaced yesterday, separate to last week's React2Shell incident.

• 🔒 GitHub shares an update on its npm token policies. All npm classic tokens have been revoked this week, and there's now a new process for getting a two hour session token or a granular access token instead.

• 🕒 Chrome 144 Beta has been released with support for the Temporal API for working with dates and times.

• Microsoft has unveiled a preview of its JavaScript/TypeScript Modernizer for VS Code - it's a tool that analyzes a project and suggests an upgrade plan for both syntax and dependencies.

• Oxlint introduces type-aware linting in alpha form.

RELEASES:

• Node.js v24.12.0 (LTS) - The first LTS release of Node.js with type stripping marked as stable.

• @platformatic/python-node v2.0 - Run Python ASGI apps in Node.js processes. Now supporting HTTP response streaming and bidirectional WebSockets.

• Bun v1.3.4 - Now with support for URLPattern, fake/controllable timers in its test runner, and console.log now supports the %j specifier like Node.

• React v19.2.3, v19.1.4, and v19.0.3

📖 Articles and Videos

How the Seattle Times is Protecting Itself from npm Supply Chain Attacks - Technical details on how the Seattle Times has been adopting pnpm as an alternative to npm for its enhanced client-side security controls.

Ryan Sobol

A Proposal for Making Complex Web Apps Faster - From Microsoft comes an early-stage look at a proposal for a new Delayed Message Timing API to help deal with the slowdowns that multiple parallel contexts (iframes, threads, multiple windows, etc) can introduce. Feedback is being sought.

Joone Hur & Patrick Brosset (Microsoft)

Behind CERN's Data Engine: Faster Writes, Instant Insights - CERN's massive time-series workloads run faster with TimescaleDB, improving ingestion, compression, and real-time analytics.

Tiger Data sponsor

Building a Tiny 2D Physics Engine in JavaScript - A lovely, and rather old-school style post about building a simple physics engine from scratch in JavaScript then golfing it down to just 2KB of source as seen on its homepage (where there's a demo too).

Maxime Euzière

📄 Non-Blocking Cross-Browser Image Rendering on the Canvas - A good way to improve UX responsiveness with more complex use cases. Alexander Myshov

📄 Prelude of the Chambered Reborn: Rewriting a Classic in TypeScript - Porting a Java game that Minecraft's creator worked on during a Ludum Dare contest. Angelo Lima

📄 Angular Tips - A documentation site covering numerous best practices for building large Angular apps. Martin Boué

🛠 Code & Tools

Open Sourcing the Remix Store - The Remix Store is a swag store for the Remix project and its codebase provides a powerful example of how Remix's own core team builds apps with Remix and Hydrogen.

Brooks Lybrand and the Remix Team

💡 You don't need to be a Remix user to benefit from this code, either. For example, here's the code to the store's neat 'glitchy' 404 page which you could adapt to use elsewhere.

🕒 <relative-time> 5.0: Format Timestamps as a Natural Language Relative Time - Supply this web component with a standard formatted date and time and it'll render "2 days ago", say. GitHub uses this itself on all repo and code views.

GitHub

Still Writing Tests Manually? - See why modern engineering teams like Dropbox, Notion and Lattice rely on Meticulous to run E2E UI tests.

Meticulous AI sponsor

ts-exec: Execute TypeScript on Node using SWC - From the creator of Adonis comes another way to run TypeScript on Node. While Node 22.18+ supports type stripping, ts-exec supports JSX and decorators and has some benefits over ts-node and tsx.

Harminder Virk

Toastflow: A Toast Notifications Library for Vue 3 - A really nifty web-based playground for playing around with toast notifications. I wish more projects had things like this. Toastflow is technically framework agnostic, but the only renderer so far is for Vue 3. GitHub repo.

Adrián Janočko

Devalue: Get the Job Done When JSON.stringify Can't - A library from the Svelte project that's like JSON.stringify but that can tackle more things like cyclical and repeated references, regexes, Map and Set, and even custom types. You can try it out here.

Svelte

iceberg-js: A JavaScript Client for Apache Iceberg - A minimal, vendor-agnostic JavaScript client for the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API that works in most runtimes and environments.

Katerina Skroumpelou (Supabase)

• Inertia 2.3 - Build single-page React, Vue and Svelte apps using classic server-side routing and controllers (ideally for integrating with server-side frameworks like Django, Rails, Laravel, etc.)

• OpenPGP.js 6.3 - OpenPGP implementation for JavaScript.

• 🗓️ React Datepicker 9.0 - Long-standing React date picker component.

• 🎸 SVGuitar 2.5 - Render guitar chord charts in SVG form.

• pnpm 10.25 - Fast, space efficient package manager.

• js-tokens 10.0 - Tiny JavaScript source tokenizer.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• 📺 Earlier this year, Dimitri Mitropoulos wowed us by running Doom inside TypeScript's type system - now he's back ▶️ showing off TypeSlayer, a tool for diagnosing and fixing TypeScript performance problems with some fantastic 3D visualizations. It looks great, but isn't public yet.

• Get up to speed with the latest developments in the world of CSS this year with the Chrome team's CSS Wrapped 2025.

• GitHub shares some updates on work it's done on its GitHub Actions platform and some new features coming in 2026.

• 🗳️ Rick Viscomi of the Google Chrome team has put out a call for you to vote for the web features you want to see in the future. This is a separate effort from the recent Interop 2025 voting process and votes will accumulate over the long term.

• 🤖 OpenAI released its GPT 5.2 model yesterday.