fidzu : javascript

#​770 - January 27, 2026

Read on the Web

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.

#​768 - January 13, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Web Dependencies are Broken; Can We Fix Them? - Lea, who has worked at the heart of Web Standards for years, delivers a compelling (and educational) call to action about a problem every JavaScript developer has encountered: why is managing dependencies and introducing them into code so unnecessarily messy and what could we do about it?

Lea Verou

Build Marketing Sites Like Apple - Learn how modern, high-impact marketing sites are built from someone doing it at the highest level. Matias Gonzales, Design Engineer at Vercel, teaches GSAP animation, scroll-driven storytelling, 3D with Three.js, and performance-first techniques used on award-winning sites.

Frontend Masters sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• 📺 The full set of React Conf 2025 videos is now online, made up of 25 talks and 23 interviews, including one with four members of the core team.

• There's a tiny update in the Deno-vs-Oracle JavaScript trademark dispute with Oracle requesting, and Deno agreeing to, a 60-day extension. As it stands, the case is set to drag into 2027.

• 📘 The Concise TypeScript Book is a short, focused TypeScript guide that's open and free to read.

RELEASES:

• Node.js January 13 2026 Security Releases - Long-awaited security releases of Node.js v20.x, 22.x, 24.x, and 25.x to resolve five different vulnerabilities.

• Bun v1.3.6 - Bun.Archive can now work with tar archives, Bun.JSONC supports parsing commented JSON, plus there are many performance optimizations and tweaks.

• pnpm 10.28 - The efficient package manager adds a beforePacking hook to customize package.json's contents at publish time.

• Angular 21.1 is expected this week. v21.1 rc0 landed last week teasing some of the updates.

• Ember 6.9, ESLint v10.0.0 RC0, Rspack 1.7

📖 Articles and Videos

Date is Out, Temporal is In - The Temporal API has been promised as a future API tackling the weaknesses of JavaScript's Date for many years now, but finally that future is arriving. Mat leans on numerous examples to show off Date's weaknesses and push Temporal's strengths here.

Mat "Wilto" Marquis

💡 Temporal's browser support still looks weak, but Chrome 144 - rolling out generally this week - brings full support. Temporal Polyfill also offers a stop-gap while native support grows.

How Wrong Can a JavaScript Date Calculation Go? - "the story of an issue that I faced that will be much easier to handle once Temporal is more widespread."

Phil Nash

Add GitHub, Slack & Google Integrations Without Rebuilding OAuth - WorkOS Pipes handles OAuth flows, token refresh, and storage. Users connect via a widget, your app makes one API call.

WorkOS sponsor

Stop Turning Everything Into Arrays (and Do Less Work Instead) - A post showing off iterator helpers, a broadly supported set of methods for working with Iterator objects as a more efficient way of processing data lazily in an iterative (rather than randomly accessed) fashion.

Matt Smith

How to 'Steal' Any React Component - A look at how to reproduce a component from a production React app without the original source, using React's internal data structures (via Fiber) and LLMs to reconstruct things.

David Fant

📄 JavaScript's for-of Loops Are Actually Fast Suren Enfiajyan

📄 Why ARM Has a 'JavaScript Instruction' - FJCVTZS, specifically. NotNotP

📄 How I Write Custom Elements with lit-html Dave Samaniego

📄 document.currentScript is More Useful Than I Thought Chris Coyier

📄 What Happened (and What's Happening) to WebAssembly Emnudge

🛠 Code & Tools

memlab 2.0: A Framework for Finding JavaScript Memory Leaks - A testing and analysis framework for identifying memory leaks and optimization opportunities that spawned from Facebook's own approach to optimizing its main app. Write scenarios, and memlab compares heap snapshots, filters memory leaks, and aggregates the results.

Facebook Open Source

The Time-Series Database That Balances Simplicity and Performance - Stay Postgres-native with automatic partitioning, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates at production scale.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Fabric.js 7.1: A Powerful SVG Abstraction Library - Provides an interactive object model on top of the HTML5 canvas to make it easier to work with multiple visual elements. Ideal for the browser but it works with Node too.

Fabric.js

Ohm: A Parsing Toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript - It's been a few years since we covered this project and it's come along a lot since. It's a library for building PEG-based parsers you can use in interpreters, compilers, analysis tools, etc. and you can even play with its grammar online.

Warth, Dubroy, et al.

Superdiff 3.2: Compares Two Arrays or Objects and Return a Diff - Got two similar objects or arrays and want to see the underlying differences? Superdiff's recent updates boost performance, add support for streamed input and using a worker for more efficient diffing in a separate thread.

antoine

• JavaScriptKit 0.38 - Swift framework to interact with JavaScript via WebAssembly.

• 🎵 alphaTab 1.8 - Music notation and guitar tab rendering library.

• Neo.mjs v11.20 - Multi-threaded application engine for the Web.

• Monio 0.70.0 - Kyle Simpson's IO monad implementation.

• Ant Design 6.2 - UI design language and React UI library.

• xstyled 4.1 - Utility-first CSS-in-JS framework for React.

• Jint 4.5 - JavaScript interpreter for .NET.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• 🤖 Even Linus Torvalds is 'vibe coding' now. He's been using Google's Antigravity tool to create some digital sound effects.

• GitHub is planning to implement 'staged publishing' for npm packages in 2026 as a way to introduce a review step before releases go live.

• 🗓️ The Astro team shares a full 2025 year in review post. It's been a big year for the popular framework.

• Anil Dash shares the story of how Markdown took over the world.

• The results of the State of HTML 2025 survey are now available.

• TIL that Deno, the JavaScript runtime, is being distributed on Python's PyPI to make it easier for Python apps to call out to JavaScript as needed.

• In 2025, Bun was the third largest contributor to JavaScriptCore, the JavaScript engine powering both Safari and Bun.