Category: News

#​729 — March 28, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

⭐ The State of Vue.js Report 2025 — Created with the support of the Vue and Nuxt teams, this is no mere collection of statistics and charts (though there’s plenty of both) but a thorough update on the state of both projects and an interview with Evan You on Vue (and Vite’s) latest developments. Essential reading for any Vue, Vite, or Nuxt user and a one-stop shop for understanding Vue and Nuxt as they stand right now.

Monterail

Master Chrome’s DevTools — Join Jon Kuperman for this video course diving into Chrome’s DevTools. You’ll go beyond console.log(), learning how to inspect, debug, and audit your web apps — tracking performance, identifying bottlenecks, making performance gains, and more. Level up your DevTools skills.

Frontend Masters sponsor

War Story: The Hardest Bug I Ever Debugged — A former engineer on the Google Docs team tells the tale of a bizarre error that afflicted Google Docs out of the blue about ten years ago. It’s a gnarly one and was only solved due to his swift access to V8’s engineers. If you’ve ever spent hours digging into a bug, you’ll feel glad you weren’t dealing with this one!

Jacob Voytko

Next.js’s Recent Middleware Security Woes — Last weekend, a new version of Next.js landed to resolve a security vulnerability that could allow middleware to be bypassed. Self-hosted Next.js deployments need to be upgraded immediately. The news led to many responses including deep dives into the vulnerability and criticism of how it was all handled.

Lee Robinson (Vercel)

IN BRIEF:

Cloudflare has done some work to bring the URLPattern URL matching API to Node.js and Cloudflare Workers.

🤖 If you haven’t checked out Google’s Gemini AI tool recently (or ever), it now supports generating HTML, JavaScript, and React code in a ‘canvas’ mode for building components on the fly.

🤖 MCP Node.js Debugger is an attempt to make Node’s debugger more accessible to third-party AI coding tools (such as Cursor or Claude Code).

📊 Is Vite faster than Turbopack? “Well, it depends.”

RELEASES:

Bun v1.2.7 – Bun’s HTTP server now has built-in support for reading and writing cookies using a Map-like API.

Node v18.20.8 (LTS) – Note that Node 18 reaches ‘end-of-life’ next month.

Sinon 20.0 – Test spies, stubs and mocks library.

pnpm 10.7, Babel 7.27.0, ESLint 9.23.0, Neutralinojs 6.0, Material UI v7

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Writing a Tiny Undo/Redo Stack in JavaScript — You might prefer to lean upon an established approach (using Immer patches perhaps), but if you want to implement something small yourself, this might help.

Julik Tarkhanov

Land Ahoy: Leaving the Sea of Nodes — A deeply technical post from a core member of the V8 JavaScript engine team that explains the limitations of Turbofan, one of V8’s optimizing compilers. If you don’t care for the internals of how your JavaScript is compiled and run, just be assured the V8 team is working to make it run even faster.

Darius Mercadier (V8)

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, O3-Mini, GPT-4o? — Better context wins every time. Wallaby provides AI with test coverage and runtime values to debug smarter. MCP support coming soon.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Mission jQuery Zero: How FreeAgent Removed jQuery From Its App — Despite popular developer sentiment, jQuery’s prevalence on the Web continues to be significant but “sometimes legends need to retire”.

Colin Gemmell

▶  React Query API Design: Lessons Learned — You might know Dominik for all his work on React Query, TanStack Router, and his epic React Query – The Bad Parts series. Here, he walks us through the design choices made while building React Query and shares lessons and mistakes valuable to anyone building their own libraries. (30 minutes.)

Dominik Dorfmeister (TkDodo)

Deploying a Next.js App to Production on Any Server — A popular article from last year that’s been updated for 2025 and Next.js 15.

Kamrannetic

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

📄 Expressing Japanese Grammar in the TypeScript Type System – A curious project out of left field. Yifeng Wang

📄 Directives: A Core Feature of the Angular Toolkit Vyacheslav Borodin

📄 You Should Know This Before Choosing Next.js Eduardo Bouças

🛠 Code & Tools

Babylon.js 8.0: Microsoft’s JavaScript 3D Engine — 8.0 adds support for improved ‘image based lighting’ and ‘area lights’ for environmental lighting and shadows, extra control of the render pipeline, and a new lightweight viewer. And, as always, they have ▶️ a short video showing it all off.

Microsoft

🤖 An MCP Server for Playwright and Browser Automation — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions on a system outside of their usual sandbox. This new project from Microsoft enables such LLMs to interact with browsers via Playwright.

Microsoft

Lexical 0.29: An Easy-to-Extend Text Editor Framework from Meta — A text editor framework built by Meta with extensibility, accessibility, and cross platform support in mind (there’s even a Swift variant for iOS). There’s a live playground if you want to give it a try.

Meta / Facebook

🔎 Fuzzball: Fuzzy String Matching Library — To tackle those cases where what’s typed isn’t quite what’s wanted. There’s a neat tree-themed Web-based demo.

Nolan

Axios 0.30 – Long-standing, promise-based isomorphic HTTP client.

Solito 4.4 – React Native + Next.js. Now supporting Next.js 15.

InversifyJS 7.2 – Inversion of control container for JavaScript.

jscodeshift 17.3 – JavaScript codemod toolkit from Facebook.

Verdaccio 6.1 – Lightweight Node.js private proxy registry.

📰 Classifieds

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.

📊 Jspreadsheet – Lightweight JS data grid with Excel-like controls. Create rich web spreadsheets fast. Try it now.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:

<select> elements have always been notoriously tricky to style with CSS but there’s a new standardized approach beginning to become available.

ls-lint is a mature tool for linting file and directory names.

Someone’s managed to get Go code to compile and run on the PlayStation 2.

👑 People’s experiments with TypeScript’s type system continue with the latest creation being a chess engine built from TypeScript types.

LLM wrangler Simon Willison was getting annoyed at being unable to easily visualize incomplete JSON documents so he built an ‘incomplete JSON’ pretty printer.

#​728 — March 21, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Rsdoctor 1.0: An Analyzer for Rspack and Webpack — A one-stop, intelligent build analyzer making it easier to identify bottlenecks and optimize performance. It’s part of the same family of tools as Rspack (a Rust-powered web bundler) but is fully webpack compatible. If you’ve ever asked why your build times are too long, this is for you.

ByteDance Inc.

💡 In other Rust-powered JavaScript tooling news, the Oxlint JavaScript linter is now in beta. Imagine ESLint, but it runs in seconds on large codebases (indeed, it can process Microsoft’s VS Code repo in under a second).

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

📉 How We Made Our Rich Text Editor Load Faster — CKEditor is a long-standing, full featured GPL and commercially licensed rich text editor but its complexity can come with a performance cost. In this two part series (part two here), the CKEditor team digs into how they’ve recently significantly boosted its performance.

Szymon Cofalik (CKEditor)

Next.js vs TanStack — An incisive essay from a developer who’s had enough of the Next.js approach and has found solace in the approach offered by the increasingly capable TanStack collection of tools (as well as Vite).

Kyle Gill

IN BRIEF:

This automatically updated runtime compatibility table lets you see how/if different server-side JavaScript runtimes support different APIs.

💬 If you’d like to hang out on Discord and chat with other Node.js developers, there’s now an official Node.js Discord server.

The Node.js TSC has voted to stop distributing Corepack with future versions of Node. Corepack was originally introduced as a way to manage other package managers.

🛠️ Make Bookmarklets is a handy tool for turning JavaScript into bookmarklet code that you can use directly in a browser bookmark.

RELEASES:

Parcel v2.14.0 – The zero-config bundler adds a new CLI to scaffold apps, first-class MDX support, and beta support for React Server Components.

Ionic 8.5 – Cross-platform JS app development platform.

📊 Billboard.js 3.15.0 – D3-powered JS chart library.

React Router 7.4

📒 Articles & Tutorials

How to Build a Snake AI Game with Docker and TensorFlow.js — You’ve probably heard about people ‘vibe coding’ games by letting LLMs do the coding work, but what if you want to build a game yourself that has neural network powered elements? TensorFlow.js offers one solution that you could just as easily adapt to non-gaming contexts.

Manvar and Raina (Docker)

The Great ESLint v9 Migration Adventure: A Developer’s Survival Guide — “Let’s just say… I’ve seen things. I hit all the bumps, took all the wrong turns, and somehow made it to the other side—so you don’t have to.”

Yacine Kharoubi

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

React Trends in 2025 — Each year Robin does a post giving his opinion on what trends he sees arising over the next year. Last year, he put his money on Astro, RSCs, Vercel, and Biome – this year he points at React Server Components, shadcn/ui, TanStack Start, React Router, and more.

Robin Wieruch

Build a Custom RAG AI Agent with TypeScript and Jupyter — Deno, Ollama, and a few different AI models come together in this tutorial for storing document embeddings in a vector store and querying them for use in a basic agent.

Kitson Kelly

📄 Training AI to Uncover Malicious JavaScript Intent and Make the Web Safer Cejuela and Zheng (Cloudflare)

📄 Lazy Load Background Images with the IntersectionObserver API Anna Monus

📄 Web Components vs. Framework Components: What’s the Difference? Gabriel Shoyombo

📄 Detecting Browser Zoom Changes in JavaScript Kirupa Chinnathambi

📄 Making a Browser Based Game With Vanilla JS and CSS Eoin McGrath

📄 Deno Shows Us There’s a Better Way Mac Chaffee

🛠 Code & Tools

Introducing Motion for Vue — Motion is a popular and powerful animation library most commonly associated with React, but now there’s a new Vue flavor and it’s feature complete, too.

Matt Perry (Motion)

Reveal.js 5.2: The HTML Presentation Framework — Brings elegant presentations to anyone with a Web browser. v5.2 adds the ability to trigger ‘lightboxes’ where viewers can see images and videos in a way where they stand out more.

Hakim El Hattab

Introducing @clerk/agent-toolkit — Build agentic systems with support for user and organizational management. Compatible with Vercel’s AI SDK and LangChain.

Clerk sponsor

Konva: A JavaScript 2D Canvas Library — The native API for Canvas elements is pretty good, but Konva is a popular abstraction that sits on top and provides a more structured way to work with shapes, styling, events, animations, and more (lots of demos with code). It also has extra integration libraries for Vue, Svelte and React.

Konva

Typist 8.0: Tiptap-Based Rich Text Editor Component — Simple and opinionated. You can try several examples linked in the sidebar. Well suited for basic rich text situations like writing comments or messages and has a single-line mode. GitHub repo.

Doist

PeanoScript: TypeScript But It’s a Theorem Prover — An experimental proof assistant for Peano arithmetic based on TypeScript syntax.

mjgrzymek

Gridstack.js 11.5 – Build responsive interactive dashboards quickly.

Repomix 0.3 – Pack an entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file.

DOCX 9.3 – Generate .docx / Word files from JavaScript.

🖼️ Parvus 3.0 – Dependency-free image lightbox control.

BlockNote 0.26 – ‘Notion-style’ block-based editor.

🤖 wllama 2.3 – WebAssembly binding for llama.cpp.

Pixi.js 8.9 – Fast, flexible 2D WebGL renderer.

📰 Classifieds

🎹 STRICH: Add blazing fast and reliable 1D/2D Barcode Scanning to your web apps. Free demo app and 30-day trial available.

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.

📊 Jspreadsheet – Lightweight JS data grid with Excel-like controls. Create rich web spreadsheets fast. Try it now.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of other interesting updates and useful resources from across the broader developer landscape:

John Tuckner took a look at the murky world of buying browser extensions for ‘fun and profit.’

If you’re using VS Code and GitHub Copilot, did you know you can ask Copilot about VS Code’s own features?

Ever wondered what’s involved in building a container image from scratch?

A look at building a Lisp interpreter in 66 lines of JavaScript.

“As an engineer, I’d rather be called stupid than stay silent.”

#​727 — March 14, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle — It looks deceptively simple – just 14 characters of JavaScript – but after working with JavaScript for 29 years, I got it wrong. A clue: it goes back to a browser-related quirk from 30 years ago..

Hillel Wayne

TypeScript’s Compiler to Get 10x Faster — TypeScript has shaken up the JavaScript ecosystem in recent years with an increasing number of developers relying on its strong typing and added structure. TypeScript’s compiler isn’t particularly fast, though, but the TypeScript team at Microsoft are changing that by porting it to Go!

Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft)

💡 Dr. Axel Rauschmayer takes a closer look at the details behind the port.

Build a Secure Project Management — Learn a security-first approach to building web applications by building a secure project management platform with Next.js.

Clerk sponsor

IN BRIEF:

Node.js v20.19.0 (LTS) is a notable release for a maintenance branch of Node as an exception has been made to the maintenance policy for backporting require(esm) support, which is now enabled by default.

The latest version of Chrome (and preview versions of Firefox and Safari) support two new HTML attributes, command and commandfor, for adding declarative actions to HTML buttons without directly requiring JavaScript.

RELEASES:

Nuxt 3.16 – Popular Vue meta-framework. Now with a new create-nuxt tool for starting projects.

Bun 1.2.5 – Now with much better Node-API compatibility, CSRF generation and verification, plus numerous perf improvements and fixes.

Melange 5 – An OCaml-to-JavaScript compiler.

Astro 5.5, Transformers.js 3.4, Capacitor 7.1, Nuxt UI v3

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Building APIs with Next.js — A detailed, official introduction to the concepts behind using Next.js’ App Router and route handlers to build public APIs you can expose to web, mobile, and third-party clients.

Lee Robinson

How The New York Times Migrated from Enzyme to React Testing Library — A thorough look at the technical challenges and strategies the NYT used to perform a piecemeal upgrade of its React testing approach without disrupting either end users or other developers.

Felipe Buenaño (NYT Open Team)

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, o3-mini, GPT-4o? — Better context wins every time. Wallaby enters the chat to give AI what it needs – test coverage and runtime values – to debug smarter.

Wallaby Team sponsor

How ECMAScript Engines Optimize Your Variables — From the authors of the Boa JS Rust-powered JavaScript engine.

Boa Developers

📄 Use Cases for the Document Picture-in-Picture API – A way to open a floating, always-on-top window (‘picture-in-picture’) that can display arbitrary HTML content. Chrome only, though. Jad Joubran

📄 Using Intl.DurationFormat to Format Time Durations with Locale Support Trevor I. Lasn

📄 Learn Zod So You Can Trust Your Data and Your Types Diana MacDonald

📄 10 Hidden Gems in Angular That You Should Use IE 33

📄 Underrated Angular Features Armen Vardanyan

🛠 Code & Tools

Refractor 5.0: Robust Virtual Syntax Highlighting using Prism — Wraps the powerful Prism syntax highlighter to output objects instead of an HTML string so you can manipulate and render it as you wish (e.g. in a VDOM or at the terminal). Lowlight, by the same author, offers the same functionality but backed by highlight.js.

Titus Wormer

svg2pdf.js: SVG to PDF Conversion in the Browser — There’s an online playground to give you a feel for what it can do.

yWorks GmbH

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

⌘K: A Fast, Composable, Unstyled ‘Command Menu’ Control — The home page includes some neat examples in a variety of styles. GitHub repo. Needs React 18+.

Paco Coursey

🔎 Node Modules Inspector — A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, “installs” a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty’s Zach Leatherman did here.

Anthony Fu

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly — PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it’s only a few megabytes in size.

ElectricSQL / Neon

Gleam 1.9 – Type-safe functional programming language that targets both the Erlang VM and JavaScript runtime.

<css-doodle> 0.42 – Web component for drawing patterns with CSS.

Faker 9.6 – Generate fabricated data to your heart’s content.

Choices 11.1 – Configurable select box/text input plugin.

🕒 Spacetime 7.8 – Lightweight timezone library.

Ink 5.2 – Use React to build CLI apps.

📰 Classifieds

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.

Current PDF setup slowing you down? Try Nutrient’s PDF SDK — it’s used by IBM, SAP, DocuSign and countless others to open, edit, and customize with ease across platforms.

👀 Give your eyes a break! MonoLisa is a font optimized for developers. Try now.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

⭐ A fantastic introduction to latency in IO devices (above) over on the PlanetScale blog, complete with very useful interactive diagrams built in JavaScript.

The Evil Martians explain things you can consider to make your open source project more popular.

🤖 Esteemed LLM-whisperer Simon Willison drops a ton of insights and tips on how he uses LLMs to help him write code.

#​726 — March 7, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Report on How the Web is Really Using JavaScript — Each year, the HTTP Archive puts together the Web Almanac, a report on the ‘state of the Web’. The JavaScript section has just gone live and goes into depth on how much JS we’re using (or failing to use!), the popularity of TypeScript, loading methods, Web Worker use, and, yes, jQuery still leads the way!

HTTP Archive

Lynx: A Fresh Way to Build Apps from Web Technologies — Lynx is a new set of tools for building JavaScript-powered native and Web apps that draws inspiration from React Native but aims to be more modular and flexible (and eventually framework agnostic). It comes from, and is used by, TikTok, and comes with its own QuickJS-based JavaScript engine.

Xuan Huang and the Lynx Team

Build Dynamic Forms with a JSON-Powered White-Label Form Builder — Create fully customizable, JSON-driven forms in your JavaScript app with SurveyJS. Our drag-and-drop form-building UI component integrates seamlessly with React, Angular, Vue 3, and vanilla JS, plus has no backend restrictions. Perfect for form-heavy apps.

SurveyJS sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 — Four months in the making, TypeScript 5.8 lands with a strong Node focus. You can now use require() for ES modules in the nodenext module, there’s a new node18 module for developers who want to keep targeting Node 18, and most notably there’s now an –erasableSyntaxOnly option to ensure no TypeScript-only runtime semantics can be used.

Microsoft

IN BRIEF:

The Svelte team shares its latest monthly update of what’s new.

Straightforward examples of basic design patterns implemented in pure JavaScript.

🤖 The folks behind the State of JS survey are running State of Web Dev AI, a new survey focused on the use of AI in modern Web development.

RELEASES:

Electron 35.0 – You can now attach a preload script to Service Workers. Dependencies are also bumped to Chromium 134 and Node 22.14.

Angular 19.2 – We mentioned this last week but there’s now an official post with more details.

React Aria March Release – Adobe’s fantastic suite of React components.

zx 8.4 – Google’s tool for better Node shell scripting.

eslint-plugin-vue v10.0.0, Readability.js 0.6, NodeBB 4.1

📒 Articles & Tutorials

JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back — A developer with ‘a decade away’ from writing JavaScript returns to find that one thing hasn’t changed: “Choosing the right JavaScript framework is hard, man.”

Allen Pike

Dr. Axel’s ‘Sales Pitch’ for TypeScript — As one of JavaScript’s most esteemed writers, if Dr. Axel can’t convince you of the value of TypeScript, who could?

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Instrument, Monitor, Fix: A Hands-On Debugging Class — Join us for a hands-on session where you’ll build it, watch it break, debug it, and go from “no idea what’s wrong” to fixing issues.

Sentry sponsor

Reimplementing Crossy Road in JavaScript — Two well put together tutorials so far covering reimplementing Crossy Road with either Three.js or React Three Fiber. In both written or video form.

Hunor Márton Borbély

Node Just Added TypeScript Support. What Does That Mean for Deno? — The Deno team, who went all in on TypeScript from day one, reflects on the continued increase in levels of support for TypeScript in Node and how their approaches differ.

Andy Jiang and Ryan Dahl

📄 Creating an Image Comparison Slider in 6 Lines of JavaScript Muffin Man

📄 Is Biome Ready to Replace Prettier and ESLint? Nicolas Pendon

📄 Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem with Rust and JavaScript Plugins Marvin Hagemeister

📄 JavaScript Best Practice: Use return await Tamás Sallai

🛠 Code & Tools

TanStack Form v1.0: Headless, Type-Safe Form State Management — A type-safe, framework agnostic (React, Vue, Angular, Solid and Lit are all supported out of the box), headless and isomorphic way to create and work with forms, with this v1.0 release over two years in the making. If you already use things like Formik or React Hook Form and are wondering how it differs, here’s a comparison table.

Tanner Linsley

PDFSlick 2.2: View and Interact with PDF Documents — A full-featured PDF viewer for React, Solid, Svelte and other JS apps. Built on top of PDF.js, it uses Zustand to provide a reactive store for documents. Demo.

Vancho Stojkov

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

Electron App Boilerplate with Modern Dependencies — A basic template app that uses React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Electron Vite, Biome, and includes a GitHub Actions release workflow.

Dalton Menezes

Fable: A F# to JavaScript Compiler — If you fancy F#’s flavor of almost-entirely-functional development, this could be for you. GitHub repo.

Fable

React Data Table: Responsive Dynamic Table Component — Simple and clean, but flexible. Includes features like column sorting and pagination out of the box. Lots of demos and code examples. GitHub repo.

John Betancur

🖼️ Cropper.js 2.0 – JavaScript image cropping control. There’s an online playground where you get a feel for all its features.

📈 Perspective 3.4 – Streaming data viz and analytics component. The core is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly. The homepage shows it off well.

Happy DOM 17.3 – Cross-runtime JS implementation of a web browser sans UI.

EasyMDE 2.20 – A simple Markdown editor control. Demo.

LogTape 0.9 – Simple logging library for all major JS runtimes.

📰 Classifieds

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.

Meet Harmony – An open source library for composing consistent and highly performant platforms from independent business features.

🏎️ Cut Integration Time – CarsXE’s API ensures minimal setup and faster deployment for your project. Learn more.

Working with in-app PDFs can be frustrating. Try Nutrient’s PDF SDK which handles problems effortlessly, so you don’t have to spend time fixing them. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

🗓️ endoflife.date is a handy, updated source of ‘end-of-life’ dates for hundreds of open source projects, including Angular, Node.js, and Vue. A great resource.

Dive into WebGPU is a fantastic four part series on using the Web’s most modern graphics API for creating striking visual effects.

FerretDB 2.0 is an interesting open source MongoDB alternative built on top of Postgres.

A look at initial support for functions in CSS. Currently an experimental Chrome Canary feature only.

#​725 — February 28, 2025

Read on the Web

✏️ Whenever we include more than a few links about TypeScript, we get complaints from people who don’t like it. We get that, we love you folks, and we’re aware. TypeScript isn’t our main focus but we do cover it, including critical pieces. That in mind, prepare yourself for our top feature… but the rest of the issue is mostly JavaScript, promise! 😅
__
Peter Cooper, your editor

JavaScript Weekly

Developer Implements ‘Doom’ in TypeScript’s Type System — A curious quirk of TypeScript’s type system is that it is Turing-complete which has led some developers to implement apps entirely in the type system. One such developer has spent eighteen months producing 177 terabytes of types to get 1993’s Doom running with them. Ridiculous and amazing in equal measure, he ▶️ explains the project in this widely lauded 7-minute video. 👏

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

Functional JavaScript First Steps, v2 — A friendly, practical introduction to functional programming fundamentals in JavaScript. Learn the power of the pure function while exploring functional programming paradigms.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Bun v1.2.3 and v1.2.4 Released — The rapid pace of progress on the JavaScriptCore-based runtime is only increasing. v1.2.3 pushes frontend dev server features (run bun ./index.html and all the bundling is done for you). bun init can now be used to create a new React project. Meanwhile, Bun 1.2.4 builds macOS apps 60% faster and macOS executables can now be code signed.

Jarred Sumner et al.

What is TypeScript? An Overview for JavaScript Programmers — You may have noticed esteemed JavaScript developer and author Dr. Axel has been on a TypeScript odyssey recently. Here he does a good job at boiling down the what (rather than the ‘why’) of TypeScript. A handy primer on what’s going on, even if you don’t plan to use it, since you’ll end up interacting with it somewhere..

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

IN BRIEF:

⭐ The Chromium team is progressing with shipping the Observable API. This is a big deal, especially for libraries like RxJS.

📊 BenchJS is an online JavaScript benchmarking sandbox worth playing with.

A look behind the scenes at recent progress on the records & tuples proposal for JavaScript (currently stage 2 at TC39). You can play with the feature here.

Windows 95 in Electron is, unsurprisingly, Windows 95 running in an Electron app! v4.0 adds Office 95 and IE 5.5 for some (limited) browsing of the Web.

📊 The results of the State of React Native 2024 survey are out.

RELEASES:

Next.js 15.2 – Now with a redesigned debugging experience and experimental support for React’s new View Transitions API and using the Node.js runtime in middleware.

Astro 5.4 – Now with remote image optimization and experimental responsive image support in Markdown.

ESLint v9.21.0 – Now with a –ext CLI option to lint files with a particular extension.

Ember.js 6.2, Angular 19.2, Node.js v23.9 (Current)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

React Libraries for 2025 — Each year, prolific React blogger Robin updates his post covering his opinionated list of essential React ecosystem libraries. He covers a lot of angles from project creation and package management through to state management, animation, form creation, auth, and i18n.

Robin Wieruch

Turbocharging V8 with Mutable Heap Numbers — The V8 team uses the JetStream2 benchmark suite to investigate performance issues and has implemented a new optimization yielding not just a 2.5x improvement in the async-fs benchmark but in other areas too.

Victor Gomes (V8)

Wish Your AI Co-Pilot Actually Knew Your Codebase? — Try the most context-aware Developer AI. Augment deeply understands your codebase, documentation, and dependencies.

Augment Code sponsor

Subverting Control with Weak References — A weak reference differs from a normal reference in that it doesn’t prevent a referenced object from being garbage collected. Most modern JS runtimes support them and James shows how they can be useful.

James Long

⭐ How JIT (Just In Time) Compilation Makes JavaScript Faster Royal Bhati

📄 Using AI in the Browser for Typo Rewriting – A poke around one of Chrome’s newest AI features. Raymond Camden

📄 A Mere Mortal’s Introduction to JIT Vulnerabilities in JS Engines Josiah Pierce

📄 How to Do Visual Regression Testing in Vue with Vitest Alexander Opalic

📄 Why We Ditched Next.js and Never Looked Back Stewart and Snelling

📄 Micro Frontends with Angular and Native Federation Manfred Steyer (Angular Blog)

🛠 Code & Tools

Svelvet 11: Build Node-Based UIs with Svelte — A mature Svelte component library for creating interactive node-based UIs and diagrams. v11 adds the ability to toggle between ‘snap grid’ and freeform modes for manipulating elements. (There’s a live demo at the bottom of the homepage.)

Open Source Labs

React Native 0.78 Released — A big release for React Native as it ships React 19 support (which requires some tweaks when upgrading) and some more minor tweaks.

Novak, Cucci, Gupta and Cipolleschi (Meta)

🔒 Protect Against Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

Random: Seedable Random Number Generator — You’ve got Math.random but this library takes things a few steps further with easy ways to create random values of various types and using different distributions (e.g. normal distribution, Bernoulli, Poisson, Pareto and Weibull).

Travis Fischer

QuickJS Sandbox 2.0: Execute JS/TS in a QuickJS Powered Sandbox — QuickJS is a small, embeddable JavaScript engine built by Fabrice Bellard and this extends it to make it easy to run code in an isolated sandboxed environment, along with some basic Node module support and a virtual file system. GitHub repo.

Sebastian Wessel

PrimeVue 4.3 – A UI component suite for Vue, now with a new ‘theme designer’ tool including a Figma-to-code feature.

🗓️ React Big Calendar 1.18 – Google Calendar/Outlook-like calendar component. Now with React 19 support.

InversifyJS 7.0 – Inversion of control container for JavaScript. There’s a v6-to-v7 upgrade guide.

React Markdown 10.0 – Component to render markdown. (Demo.)

fast-png 6.3 – Pure JavaScript PNG image decoder and encoder.

Mercurius 16.1 – Implement GraphQL servers on top of Fastify.

Varlet 3.9 – Material Design-inspired component library for Vue 3.

file-type 20.4 – Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data.

FxTS 1.5 – Functional library for TS/JS devs.

📰 Classifieds

🎹 STRICH: Add blazing fast and reliable 1D/2D Barcode Scanning to your web apps. Free demo app and 30-day trial available.

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.

📣 Creators of the State of JS, Vue.js, Vite, Pino & Fastify — have you seen the new JSNation speakers? Get 10% off with code JSWEEKLY.

Bit – A build system framework for development of composable software. Natively to Harmony, and support Node.js, React apps (with Vite), NextJS, Angular, Vue and more.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

Remember Ajax? The popular term bringing together several technologies involving asychronous JavaScript making dynamic updates by calling the server was coined in this article 20 years ago this month.

🤖 Is it viable to have LLMs write alt-text for your images? Dries Buytaert put a few models through their paces.

GitHub is getting involved with the AI developer agent game and shows off a preview of its new Copilot ‘agent mode’.

🌊 A detailed look at the techniques behind high-performance, real-time fluid simulations with WebGPU.

Electronic Arts certainly doesn’t make a habit of open sourcing old games, but it’s just done that for 1996’s Command and Conquer: Red Alert, one of the pioneering games in the real time strategy genre.

#​724 — February 21, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

TC39 Advances 3 Proposals to Stage 4 — I love seeing Rob Palmer’s tweets about TC39’s progression of JavaScript proposals and this is a good roundup from this week’s meeting in Seattle. Areas covered include near-term features like Float16Array and import defer to more distant things like Math.clamp and Error.captureStackTrace entering stage 1.

Sarah Gooding

Deno 2.2 Released with Quality of Life Improvements — The Deno team took a break from taking on Oracle to get a new feature-packed release of its JavaScript runtime out. We get built-in OpenTelemetry integration, linter updates, a new interactive way to update dependencies, node:sqlite support, TypeScript 5.7, V8 13.4, and much more.

Iwańczuk and Jiang

A Powerful JavaScript Reporting Tool Built for the Web — ActiveReportsJS is the premier JavaScript reporting tool designed for advanced data visualizations in web applications. With many different advanced report builders and viewers, insights can be seamlessly shared with your entire user base.

MESCIUS Inc. sponsor

Interop 2025: Features Browser Devs Will Focus on This Year — Interop is an ongoing process where browser devs cooperate on improving features in concert so more Web users can use those features sooner. This year’s focus points include the Storage Access API, pointer/mouse events, phasing out old mutation events, the scrollend event, URLPattern, and more JS/WASM integration.

Nicole Sullivan (WebKit)

IN BRIEF:

Last year, ESLint unveiled a plan to become a more general purpose linter and added JSON and Markdown linting in due course. The latest addition? ESLint is now a CSS linter too!

🕹️ Running Pong across 240 browser tabs is a creative combination of AppleScript and JavaScript. Next stop – Tetris?

RELEASES:

React Native 0.78 – Now complete with React 19.

Nano ID 5.1 – Tiny URL-friendly unique string ID generator.

TypeScript 5.8 RC, Node.js v18.20.7 (LTS)

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties? — I know this sounds like a geographical piece, but this developer’s curiosity led to a fun blend of JavaScript and the always useful Overpass Turbo mapping tool.

Ivan Ludvig

React Officially Sunsetting Create React App — This move has been bubbling for a long time now, but the React team is now officially recommending CRA-powered apps migrate to a framework (like Next.js) or build tools like Vite.

Matt Carroll and Ricky Hanlon

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, o3-mini, GPT-4o? — Better context wins every time. Wallaby enters the chat to give AI what it needs – test coverage and runtime values – to debug smarter.

Wallaby Team sponsor

Why TypeScript 5.8’s –erasableSyntaxOnly Matters — “It disables a bunch of features that I don’t think should ever have been part of TypeScript.”

Matt Pocock

📄 Svelte 5 and the Future of Frameworks: A Chat with Rich Harris Frederick O’Brien

📄 Implementing a Dissolve Effect with Shaders and Particles in Three.js Jatin Chopra

📄 How to Move the First Element to the End in JavaScript Josh Sherman

📄 Deeply Understand Currying in 7 Minutes Yazeed Bzadough

🛠 Code & Tools

Mastra: A TypeScript AI Framework from the Gatsby Team — From some of the folks behind the Gatsby React framework comes a new way to build LLM-powered agents that perform various tasks, use knowledge bases, and hold memory. Think a meta-framework like Next.js but for AI agents. GitHub repo.

Mastra

upfetch: An Advanced fetch Client Builder — A TypeScript library to enhance fetch with schema validation, automatic response parsing, and type-safety, while maintaining the familiar fetch API.

Laurent Blondy

Find. Fix. Test: An Intro to App Monitoring with Sentry — Code-level visibility, from pre- to post-release, lets devs find and fix errors and slowdowns and deploy with confidence.

Sentry sponsor

📄 jsPDF 3.0: Client-Side JavaScript PDF Generation — Create tickets, documents, certificates, etc. all on the fly. There’s a live demo on the project’s homepage.

Parallax

Heat.js: A Heat Map Visualization Library — Think the GitHub contributions heat map. No dependencies, small, responsive, and theme-able. There’s a live demo or its GitHub repo.

William Troup

Zoompinch: A Pinch-and-Zoom Experience for Vue 3 Apps — Designed to ‘feel native’ on mobile devices. Demo.

Elya Maurice Conrad

swrv: ‘stale-while-revalidate’ Data Fetching for Vue 3 — Uses a ‘stale-with-revalidate’ cache invalidation strategy (i.e. data is returned from cache immediately but then updated behind the scenes).

Kong

ExcellentExport.js: Export Table Data to Excel or CSV — If your app/page has some data in HTML tables and you’d like to export it to CSV or XLSX without any server involvement, this could help.

Jordi Burgos

Ts.ED 8.5 – Node + TypeScript framework on top of Express.

🖼️ pixelmatch 7.0 – Small, fast pixel-level image comparison library.

dash.js 5.0 – A reference implementation for playback of MPEG DASH.

DOCX 9.2 – Generate .docx / Word files from JavaScript.

ApexCharts 4.5 – Popular JS charting library. (Demos.)

Middy 6.1 – Node.js middleware engine for AWS Lambda.

Size Limit 11.2 – Performance budget tool for JavaScript.

🔈 useSound 5.0 – React hook for playing sound effects.

📰 Classifieds

Learn how to build session-based authentication into a Next.js application, including the sign-in/sign-up pages, and how to protect routes.

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.

Design Meets Development: Amir Shalev shares his unique journey bridging the gap and seamlessly collaborating with developers using Bit.

😰 Is your vehicle data giving you anxiety? Mine too. That’s why I built CarsXE. Now I just have existential dread. Progress! Start for Free Now!

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape:

The XOR operator, and logic gate, explained. (You can use XOR yourself in JavaScript with the ^ operator.)

Learn Shader Programming with Rick and Morty is a fun and accessible way to learn a bit about shaders and GLSL and, in particular, rendering shapes with shaders.

Beej, author of several popular guides to different programming concepts, has released Beej’s Guide to Git, a great zero-to-expert online resource for using the world’s most popular DVCS.

Most of them don’t apply to JavaScript, but I found this walkthrough of NASA’s “10 rules for software development” quite interesting.