#730 — April 4, 2025
JavaScript Weekly
Bare: A New Lightweight Runtime for Modular JS Apps — Imagine something like Node.js but really stripped back: bare, if you will. Like Node, it’s built on top of V8 and libuv (though it’s designed to support multiple JavaScript engines) but Bare’s approach is to provide as little as possible (a module system, addon system, and thread support) and then rely upon userland modules that can evolve independently of Bare itself. It’s an interesting idea – more details here.
Holepunch
An Update on the Deno v Oracle JavaScript™ Fight — Deno filed a petition with the USPTO to cancel the ‘JavaScript’ trademark, as claimed by Oracle, and Oracle stepped up to fight back. Ryan recaps the basic story and asks for help to get the word out (signing the open letter is a great start, if you agree Oracle abandoned the trademark).
Ryan Dahl
AG Grid: The Best JavaScript Data Grid In The World — Create high-performance data grids with our open-source library, trusted by 90% of the Fortune 500. Add advanced features like Integrated Charting, Grouping, Pivoting and more with a few lines of code. Supports React, Angular and Vue. Try for free.
AG Grid sponsor
React 19.1 Released — The headline feature is Owner Stacks, a dev-only feature to track which components are responsible for rendering other components. 19.1 also brings fixes, small additions (like support for streaming in edge environments), a new API for prerendering RSCs on the server, and enhanced Suspense support.
Matt Carroll (Facebook)
IN BRIEF:
Safari 18.4 has been released with Declarative Web Push support, iterator helpers, Error.isError, and faster JSON.parse and JSON.stringify functions.
There’s a longstanding proposal to bring TS-style enums to JavaScript and author Ron Buckton will be pitching it to TC39 at its next meeting. Here’s a slidedeck covering the benefits. Thanks to Rob Palmer for highlighting this.
The ES2025 spec has reached candidate stage in anticipation of being finally approved in June.
RELEASES:
Express 5.1 – The long standing Node.js web framework gets a bump with 5.x finally becoming the latest tagged version on npm.
React Email 4.0 – Components and tools for rendering HTML emails.
zx 8.5 – Google’s tool for better Node shell scripting.
Astro 5.6, Ember 6.3, Turborepo 2.5, Node.js v23.11.0, Bun v1.2.8
📒 Articles & Tutorials
Exploring Art with TypeScript, Jupyter, Polars, and Observable Plot — One of Deno’s compelling features is its support for Jupyter Notebooks and easy notebook-style programming, such as is common in the Python world. Trevor looks at a practical use of using such a notebook environment for data exploration.
Trevor Manz
Could JavaScript Have Synchronous await? — Dr. Axel reflects on the problems around async code being different to synchronous code and ways around the limitations faced. What could the consequences of a synchronous await be?
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
Hands-On Debugging Session: Instrument, Monitor, and Fix — Build it, break it, debug it, and fix it — with Sentry. See how to get set up, track errors, use Session Replay and the new Trace Explorer, plus leverage AI to find and fix issues fast.
Sentry sponsor
JavaScript’s Missing Link? Wasp Offers a Full Stack Solution — A look at what the Wasp team is trying to do building a full-stack webapp framework around React, Node, and Prisma. It’s a powerful option if you’re looking for a more traditional-feeling full-stack approach.
Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)
🚂 How a Steam Locomotive from 1993 Broke My Yarn Test – A fun bug hunting tale that actually delivers on its title. Yew Leong
📄 Breaking Down Circular Dependencies in JavaScript Bryan Braun
📄 Automated Visual Regression Testing with Playwright Frederik Dohr
📄 Lessons Learned From My First Dive Into WebAssembly Chris Wellons
🛠 Code & Tools
Anime.js 4.0: A JS Animation Library for the Web — If you’re tired of Web animations, maybe Anime.js will refresh your appetite. This is a major upgrade to a mature library for animating CSS properties, SVGs, the DOM, and JS objects. It’s smooth, well-built, and now complete with fresh documentation.
Julian Garner
Learn How to Integrate Clerk with Lovable — Lovable integrates Clerk for custom domains, streamlined auth flows, and waitlist-powered onboarding.
Clerk sponsor
Milkdown 7.7: WYSIWYG Markdown Editor Framework — A WYSIWYG Markdown editor framework based around a plugin system that enables a high level of customization. The docs are rendered by Milkdown itself. GitHub repo.
Mirone
TinyBase v6.0: A Reactive Data Store for Local-First Apps — We’re huge fans of this powerful reactive data store that can be used as the entire backend for many types of app. v6.0 adds no new functionality but brings React 19 support and goes ESM-only. Check out the homepage for more.
James Pearce
🤖 node-llama-cpp 3.7 – Run LLMs locally with bindings to llama.cpp.
bignumber.js 9.2 – Arbitrary-precision decimal and non-decimal arithmetic.
TS-Pattern 5.7 – Pattern matching library with smart type inference.
React Admin 5.7 – Framework for building B2B frontend interfaces.
UVCanvas 0.3 – Render beautifully shaded canvases from React.
Danfo.js 1.2 – Pandas-inspired JavaScript data analysis toolkit.
Vuetify 3.8 – Vue component framework.
📰 Classifieds
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards, etc.
✉️ Don’t forget we have two other JavaScript related newsletters if you work with Node.js or React: Node Weekly and React Status respectively.
📢 Elsewhere
A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:
If you fancy writing a blog post that could make it into JavaScript Weekly, checking out How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read by Michael Lynch isn’t a bad idea.. 🙂 (Then hit reply and tell us about it!)
Chrome 135+ includes support for the CSS Overflow 5 spec which makes it easier to create native scrolling and carousel experiences.
Yoni Goldberg writes about the sweet and powerful ‘use case’ code pattern.
Some tips from GitHub for project maintainers: 5 GitHub Actions Every Maintainer Needs to Know
🤖 The New Stack’s Alex Williams looks at how AI agents are transforming frontend development.