fidzu : news

#​743 - July 4, 2025

Read on the Web

🖊️ It's been a quiet week with heatwaves and holidays seeming to slow the usual flow, but we've made it.. thanks to a few items out of left field 😅 For our US readers, happy Independence Day!
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Peter Cooper, your editor

☀️ JavaScript Weekly ☀️

Deno 2.4: deno bundle is Back - Deno 2.4 reintroduces the deno bundle command for creating single-file bundles for both the server and client side, complete with support for npm and JSR dependencies and automatic tree-shaking. You can also now include arbitrary files into modules using import, and Deno's built-in OpenTelemetry support is now stable. It's a substantial release.

Iwańczuk and Jiang

💡 Not to play favorites, Bun v1.2.18 is now out too.

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

What's New in ECMAScript 2025: Another Take - Last week we featured Dr. Axel's look at what's new in ES2025, but Paweł has another example-led take here that you might enjoy.

Paweł Grzybek

IN BRIEF:

• ⚖️ Ryan Dahl has an update on the ongoing JavaScript™ trademark dispute. Oracle has about a month to respond in full to Deno's cancellation petition.

• JS1024 is an annual JavaScript code golfing contest. You've got till July 19 to submit a JavaScript program written in 1024 bytes or less on the theme of 'Creepy'.

• Today's the final day you can vote for an official Angular mascot.

• In other Angular news, there's now a new way to track Angular-specific data in Chrome DevTools.

• Microsoft has open-sourced its GitHub Copilot Chat extension for VS Code. Even if you have no interest in AI, it offers a good look at how MS builds its own extensions.

RELEASES:

• Rspack 1.4 - Fast Rust-based (and webpack compatible) web bundler. v1.4 can now run in the browser, too, thanks to WebAssembly.

• Electron 37.0 - The cross-platform desktop app toolkit.

• ESLint 9.30.0 and 9.30.1

• Astro 5.11, Babel 7.28.0, Three.js r178

📖 Articles and Videos

How to Build Your Own Color Search Engine - A straightforward, practical look at bringing together several technologies and skills to create an AI powered color suggestion tool (which you can try here - results may vary, as seen above). The techniques covered can be used for many different practical ends.

Lúí Smyth

Building a Lightweight Reactive State Manager with JavaScript Proxies - What if you didn't need a library for reactive state mangement? What if you could build a system that's powerful and simple using a native JS feature? You can!

Loren Stewart

The Road to Next - Learn full-stack web development with Next.js 15 and React 19. The perfect match for JavaScript developers ready to go beyond the frontend.

Robin Wieruch sponsor

⏪ A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle - The most popular item in JavaScript Weekly this year (so far) was simple in presentation but also deceptively simple in what it asked. 14 characters of JS and one straightforward question - can you get it right?

Hillel Wayne

Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025 - A reflection on the potential of Node as it stands right now. Ashwin reminds us of various developments, including the use of ES modules, built-in Web APIs, the test runner, watch mode, the permission model, import maps, and more.

Ashwin

📄 Transmitting Data via Ultrasound Without Special Equipment - A creative use for JavaScript and the Web Audio API. Lorenz Diener

📺 What Every React Developer Should Know About Signals Ryan Carniato

📄 Custom 3D Models in Mapbox: A Step-by-Step Guide - Niche, but potentially very useful. Mykola Chernyshevskyi

📄 How JSDoc Saved My Dev Workflow Jordan Booker

🛠 Code & Tools

Milkdown: A Plugin-Driven WYSIWYG Markdown Editor Framework - A WYSIWYG Markdown editor framework based around a plugin system that enables a significant level of customization. The docs are rendered by Milkdown itself and there's a neat 'playground' experience to try as well. GitHub repo.

Mirone

Repomix 1.0: Pack a Codebase Into an AI-Friendly Format - Enter a GitHub URL, choose your settings (XML, MD, etc), and get a blob that's ideal if you want an LLM to answer questions about or analyze that repo. You can use it online or as a library in Node. GitHub repo.

Kazuki Yamada

You Can Now Run Playwright Tests on Real iOS Devices with Safari - Spot iOS-specific issues by testing web apps on real iPhones & iPads, with logs, video playback & true Safari rendering.

BrowserStack sponsor

snapDOM 1.8: Captures DOM Nodes as Images - A rapidly maturing, fast and accurate DOM-to-image capture mechanism to capture any HTML element as a scalable SVG image, preserving styles, fonts, background images, etc. The homepage is packed with examples.

ZumerLab

🗓️ Time Picker: A shadcn/ui-Based Date/Time Picker Component - Simple, elegant, and feels good to use.

OpenStatus

🎨 Spectral.js: A 'Paint-Like' Color Mixing Library - If you have two colors to transition between, tweening the RGB values can result in some ugly intermediate colors. Spectral.js uses Kubelka-Munk theory which more closely matches how paints work for a visually satisfying result.

Ronald van Wijnen

• Protobuf-ES 2.6 - Full Protocol Buffers implementation for JS/TS.

• ♟︎ React Chessboard 5.0 - Render chess boards with React. (Examples.)

• Faker 9.9 - Generate fabricated data to your heart's content.

• jQuery Terminal Emulator 2.45 - Create web-based terminal experiences. (Demo.)

• iCal.js 2.2 - Parser for ICS (RFC5545) and vCard (RFC6350).

• NG-MATERO 20.0 - Angular-based admin template.

• Mineflayer 4.30 - Create Minecraft bots in JavaScript.

• css-select 6.0 - CSS selector compiler and engine.

• Pixi.js 8.11 - Fast, flexible 2D WebGL renderer.

👀 Elsewhere...

Here's a selection of things from the broader ecosystem this week:

• Engineers at Patreon have shared the story of a huge internationalization refactor they've done recently touching over 10,000 JavaScript call sites. I don't envy this task.

• If Cloudflare Workers are too limited for your use case, Cloudflare has a new option: Cloudflare Containers. Containers is integrated with Workers but, unsurprisingly, lets you package up your app in container images and run them in a flexible way.

• I found the story of how One Million Chessboards, a live, online 1000x1000 grid of chess boards was engineered and scaled to be quite fascinating.

• Sharon Brizinov shares the tale of how they tracked down numerous force-pushed 'oops' commits on GitHub and uncovered secrets worth $25k in bug bounties.

• Popular MySQL cloud provider PlanetScale is entering the Postgres space. It's in 'private preview' but they've already teased some benchmarks.

• 🎵 If you fancy getting creative, Strudel is a neat way to code music in the browser. There's a lot to enjoy here with live examples throughout the docs.

#​742 - June 27, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Ecma International Approves ECMAScript 2025: What's New? - It's that time of year again. The Ecma General Assembly has approved the ES2025 language specification, which you can read in full here if you have a gallon of coffee to hand - or you can enjoy Dr. Axel's more succinct explainer instead.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

What's Coming to JavaScript - The ES2025 spec is great, but what else is coming down the pike? The Deno team has put together a look, complete with code samples, at nine proposals progressing through TC39's process right now.

Casonato and Jiang (Deno)

Fullstack without Frameworks - Maximiliano Firtman combines vanilla JavaScript and Go to create high-performance apps from scratch. Follow along in this video course and learn more about web components, dynamic client-side routing, authentication, logging and everything in between.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Vite 7.0 Released - At five years old, Vite has radically changed the frontend building experience and is an essential tool for many. v7 is an evolutionary step more than a revolutionary one and should prove an easy upgrade from v6.

VoidZero Inc.

IN BRIEF:

• The speaker lineup for JSConf 2025 has been announced. It takes place in Maryland this October.

• If you love the V8 team's deep dives, they have a new one looking at two new optimizations introduced into V8 for speeding up WebAssembly.

• Shopify's William Candillon reflects on the future of advanced graphics in React Native using React Native Skia, and how WebGPU, Three.js, and a new backend called Skia Graphite are changing the game.

• The popular and long standing Construct HTML5 + JavaScript game development environment now has full built-in support for TypeScript too.

• The Angular team has created a set of LLM prompts and AI IDE rules files to help Angular developers get better code out of LLMs.

• Vercel hosted its annual Vercel Ship event this week and they made so many announcements, you'll need this recap post to get through them all.

• 🕒 The Temporal API proposal is now a Stage 3 Draft.

RELEASES:

• Transformers.js 3.6 - Run machine learning models in the browser, Node, Deno & Bun. Now supporting Gemma 3n (though not in-browser yet).

• zx 8.6 - Google's tool for better Node shell scripting.

• Node.js v22.17.0 (LTS), v24.3.0 (Current) and v20.19.3 (LTS)

• Prettier 3.6, Bun v1.2.17, SVGO 4.0

📖 Articles and Videos

Tips for Making Regular Expressions Easier to Use in JavaScript - Dr. Axel asks us to imagine if we had to write JavaScript without any whitespace or comments, so why should we have to write regexes that way? He has some tips for making the process more pleasant.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Creating a Simple RSS Server Side Reader - Alex likes that blogs have feeds, but isn't so keen on modern feed readers, so he put together a surprisingly simple Deno-based approach to scrape feeds and produce an automatically updated HTML page linking to the latest items.

Alex Kladov

How OAuth Works - A practical guide to OAuth Scoped Access with code examples, security tips, and how third-party integrations really work.

Clerk sponsor

📄 Implementing an Undo/Redo System in a Complex Visual Application mlacast

📄 No Time To Learn (Web) Framework X - How can you judge when it's worth the time to learn something new? Wouter Groeneveld

📄 Comparing Rust, JavaScript and Go for Authoring WASM Components Obelisk

📄 How to Write Compelling Software Release Announcements Michael Lynch

📺 Generating Playwright Tests with AI: Let's Try the New Playwright MCP Server Stefan Judis

🛠 Code & Tools

Hono 4.8: A Cross-Runtime Standards-Oriented Web Framework - Hono is a framework well worth exploring. It's fast, lightweight, built on Web Standards, and can be used to build apps that work on numerous platforms from Node or Bun to Cloudflare or Fastly. v4.8 adds new route helper functions, improvements to JSX streaming and CORS, a new plugin system for static site generation, and more.

Yusuke Wada and Contributors

LogTape 1.0.0: Universal Logging for JavaScript Apps - Whether it's in Node, the browser, or edge functions, LogTape is here for you. It's particularly aimed at library developers who want to add logging in a low hassle way for end users - learn more here.

Hong Minhee

💡 If you want the full sales pitch, Hong Minhee explains why you'll (probably) love LogTape if you're a JavaScript library builder.

🤖 Google Unveils Gemini CLI: An Open-Source AI Agent - Google has dipped its toe into the rapidly growing AI dev agent game with a terminal-based agent, built in TypeScript, with a striking high free usage allowance, making it a good way to give such tools a try if you haven't so far.

Mullen and Salva (Google)

PLJS 1.0: JavaScript Language Plugin for Postgres - PLV8 has been the 'go to' way to use JavaScript as a procedural language within Postgres for years, but this QuickJS-based variant, from the same maintainer, has a far lighter footprint, is easier to maintain, and may be enough for your needs.

Jerry Sievert

Marked 16.0: A Fast Markdown Parser and Compiler - Demo here to see it in action. GitHub repo.

Christopher Jeffrey

Vue Infinity: Virtualized Rendering for Large Datasets - The idea is simple: if it's not visible, it doesn't get rendered. A handy way to keep things fast when dealing with large feeds, carousels, dashboards, etc. GitHub repo.

Isaac Tewolde

Spark: Advanced 3D Gaussian Splatting Renderer for Three.js - Check out the live examples.

World Labs Technologies, Inc.

• 📊 Billboard.js 3.16.0 - The popular chart library adds 'trending lines' to bar charts, perf improvements, and other tweaks.

• Hako 1.0 - An embeddable, lightweight, high-performance JavaScript engine built atop QuickJS.

• React Admin 5.9 - Framework for building B2B frontend interfaces.

• 📊 AG Charts 12.0 - Full-featured, customizable charting library.

• 📈 Recharts 3.0 - D3-powered chart library for React.

🎁 A few bonus items..

Just some things I've seen that didn't fit anywhere else, but I wanted to give a quick mention:

• 🤖 Google has released Gemma 3n, its latest locally-runnable LLM. It performs very well for its size (5B and 8B parameter counts) and if you've got the right hardware, you can run it easily with Ollama and similar tools.

• Coder extraordinare Bisqwit is back from a long hiatus with ▶️ a video on cracking game passwords in 1980s NES games.

• David Heinemeier Hansson, of Ruby on Rails fame, has released Omarchy - an 'opinionated Arch/Hyprland setup' to get Linux working in an aesthetically pleasing way for software developers, whether using Ruby or not.

• A notably buff John Carmack recently gave a talk (complete with his first slide deck ever) about ▶️ his team's work and research directions around machine learning, multi-task learning, and getting AI to play Atari games.

• How to disable zsh history for a given shell session - a handy trick.

P.S. Yes, I actually wrote with a sharpie on my bookshelf for today's header graphic and it doesn't come off so easily. But it was worth it.

#​741 - June 20, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

📖 Exploring JavaScript (ES2025 Edition) - Dr. Axel is back with his latest book covering all things relating to modern JavaScript at the language level (think built-in data types, modularity, how objects, classes and promises work, etc.). As with all of Axel's books, it's available to buy but also to read online in HTML form for free. He's also produced a set of flashcards to help you learn language features in both HTML and Anki forms.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

💡 The two sets of flashcards (including API flashcards) are worth a look on their own as you'll almost certainly learn/remember something useful looking through them.

How Notion Cut Typing Latency By 15% - Stop guessing why your web app is slow. Palette's production JS profiler tells you why, down to the line of code. Get started for free today.

Palette sponsor

Biome v2: The First Type-Aware Linter That Doesn't Require tsc - Boasts being the first JavaScript and TypeScript linter that doesn't require the TypeScript compiler, while still offering type-aware linting rules. There's a lot to enjoy here, including initial support for linter plugins and improved monorepo support, though note that Vue and Svelte templates aren't yet supported.

Emanuele Stoppa

IN BRIEF:

• The Google Chrome team shares an update to the HTML specification around the escaping of < and > in HTML attributes.

• Collaborative design tool company Figma has acquired Payload, creators of the popular eponymous open source Next.js backend framework/CMS.

• 🇳🇱 Vite's official conference, ViteConf, takes place this October 9-10 in Amsterdam. Its CFP is open till July 1.

• JSON module scripts are now Baseline 'Newly Available'.

RELEASES:

• Bun v1.2.16 - The high performance JS runtime adds support for returning files for routes via Bun.serve, along with a slew of bugfixes and Node compatibility improvements.

• Astro 5.10 - The content-driven JS framework makes its responsive images feature stable, and adds a new experimental feature: live content collections.

• ESLint v9.29.0 - Now supports the syntax used for explicit resource management (using and await using).

• Hono 4.8, Relay v20, Fastify 5.4, NeutralinoJS 6.1, Axios 1.10.0

📖 Articles and Videos

▶ Compiling JavaScript Ahead-of-Time - The creator of the Porffor JavaScript compiler talks about the various ways to make JavaScript faster to execute, before digging into Porffor's approach.

Oliver Medhurst

Using await at the Top Level in ES Modules - Top-level await is supported in all modern browsers and in Node.js (beyond v16) in .mjs files or .js files specified as modules.

Matt Smith

Clerk OAuth Gets a Big Upgrade - Now Fully MCP-Ready - Clerk OAuth now supports token revocation, consent screens, dynamic clients, & more-now fully MCP-ready. Learn more here.

Clerk sponsor

JavaScript Broke the Web (and Called It Progress) - An esteemed SEO consultant shares his thoughts on the complexity of the modern Web and JavaScript's role in particular.

Jono Alderson

How TypeScript Solved Its Global Iterator Name Clash - ES2025 adds an Iterator class containing iterator helper methods. However, this class conflicts with TypeScript's existing types for iterators..

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

📄 'How Cursor Upgraded Our Storybook in Just 2 Hours' - If you're going to use AI, it might as well be to speed up boring tasks. Uri Klar

📄 Coding a 3D Audio Visualizer with Three.js, GSAP and Web Audio API Filip Zrnzevic

📄 Bringing React's <ViewTransition> to Vanilla JS Joeri Sebrechts

🛠 Code & Tools

<syntax-highlight>: A Custom Element for Syntax Highlighting - A custom element that uses the CSS Custom Highlight API (supported by most modern browsers) for syntax highlighting so you don't need to retreat to the age-old method of wrapping every token in spans. GitHub repo.

André Ruffert

React Native 0.80 Released - React Native 0.80 lands with React 19.1, a new opt-in set of stricter TypeScript types, and experimental support for prebuilt dependencies on iOS to speed up builds. The legacy architecture is now officially 'frozen', with warnings for APIs slated for future removal.

Cohen, Cucci, Dall'Agnol, and Falch

Handsontable: Spreadsheet-Like JavaScript Data Grid for Your App - Feature-rich data grid for developers seeking a powerful, customizable, and accessible solution to manage complex data.

Handsontable sponsor

react-searchable-dropdown: A Customizable Dropdown Component - A modern, accessible, and customizable dropdown component that supports large datasets with virtualization, lets users create new options, works with both simple and complex data, and is easy to style and extend. GitHub repo.

Lucio D'Alessandro

WelsonJS: Build Windows Apps Using Windows' Built-In JS Engine - WelsonJS = Windows + Electron-like + JS. Optimized for environments with limited computing power.

Go Namhyeon

• MockRTC 0.5 - Intercept, assert on and mock WebRTC peers.

• State in URL 5.0 - Store any user state in query parameters. v5 adds Remix support, but it also supports Next.js and React Router.

• LogTape 0.12 - Logging library for JavaScript and TypeScript with zero dependencies and support for multiple environments.

• 📊 Ant Design Charts 2.4 - React chart library. Demos and code samples.

• 📊 Chart.js 4.5 - Simple Canvas-based charting. (Samples.)

• tiff 7.0 - Pure JS TIFF image decoding library.

👀 Elsewhere...

Here's a selection of things from the broader ecosystem this week:

• The creators of the CKEditor JavaScript rich-text editor explain, in depth, how they made their editor's bundle 40% smaller.

• Ernie Smith tells the story of why JPEGs still rule the Web.

• 🤖 Cloudflare has unveiled a way to connect any React app to an MCP server in just three lines of code, using its use-mcp hook.

• Microsoft recently released a new VS Code extension for working with Postgres. There's now also ▶️ a presentation showing off how it can be used.

• Git 2.50.0 has been released and it's quite a significant release. GitHub also rounded up some of what's new.

• A thorough tutorial to using and creating Makefiles.