JavaScript Weekly

npm 12, TypeScript 7, and Bun in Rust

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#794 — July 14, 2026

JavaScript Weekly

📈 TanStack's npm Package Download Charts — A quick way to chart package popularity over time, look for trends, and see what libraries and tools have soared or fallen. The default view compares TanStack's packages against several common packages, but you can enter any packages you wish, or see pre-defined sets like build tools, component libraries, or UI frameworks.

TanStack

Your AI Writes the Code. CodeRabbit Reviews It — AI can write the code, but you still own what ships. CodeRabbit is the AI-native review layer that catches the bugs and edge cases humans skim past, so what merges matches what you intended. Free to try, 2-click install.

CodeRabbit sponsor

Rewriting Bun in Rust — Bun's creator shares the full story of porting the JavaScript runtime from Zig to Rust, with the assistance of many Claude Code instances churning through ~$165k in usage (at API prices). The Rust version forms the basis of Bun 1.4, expected any day now.

Jarred Sumner

npm v12 Released: Install Scripts are Off by Default — npm 12 is now GA with many breaking changes. The big change is lifecycle scripts no longer run by default, but here are more practical implications to consider. It may also be worth upgrading via 11.18.0 first.

GitHub

IN BRIEF:

TC39's 115th meeting takes place next week. Here's the agenda, including Await Dictionary aiming for Stage 3, plus Decimal, Import Defer and Map.take.
Next.js now has a formal security release program with monthly announcements and scheduled releases. The first is expected on July 20.
⚠️ The jscrambler npm package suffered a supply chain attack at the weekend which Socket detected within six minutes.
The Porffor ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler is now self-hosting (can compile itself with itself).
Vercel has acquired the team behind Better Auth, the popular auth library.

RELEASES:

⭐ TypeScript 7.0 – The final release of the "10x faster" Go-powered version of the TypeScript compiler is here. A (temporary) lack of a full API means many users are recommended to stay on 6.0 for now, though.
Node.js 26.5.0 (Current) – Adds support for importing text files in ES modules via import attributes, plus blob.textStream().
ESLint 10.7, Storybook 10.5, Vite DevTools 0.4

📖 Articles and Videos

Proxy and Reflect: Redefining How Objects Fundamentally Work — A deep dive into intercepting the internal operations of JavaScript objects, covering why Reflect exists at all, and ending with a small reactive state system (essentially how Vue 3's reactivity works).

Mat Marquis

In Defense of Polyfills — Prolific standards editor Anne van Kesteren said polyfilling is harmful. Lea disagrees, arguing "ponyfills are just userland libraries with better marketing" and a web without polyfills would be a stagnant one.

Lea Verou

Sentry + GitHub: Bugs Diagnosed and Fixed, Live — Sentry catches it, Seer diagnoses it, Copilot writes the fix. Watch Sentry and GitHub break a script live July 15th.

Sentry sponsor

Collaborative Editing in Wordgard — Marijn recently released his new Wordgard rich text editor (and ProseMirror successor). Here's his third take on collaborative editing in eleven years, still based on operational transformation (OT) rather than CRDTs.

Marijn Haverbeke

💡 We missed Marijn's Wordgard release post in last week's Wordgard feature. He explains why and how he built it (no LLMs!) and why he's not taking pull requests.

Reverse Engineering ChatGPT's Web Stack — The author spent days breaking down ChatGPT's page source, bundles, and requests. React Router 7, TanStack Query, Radix, and ProseMirror all make an appearance.

Dennis Brotzky

📄 Playwright on GitHub Actions: A Setup That Actually Runs Fast Jakob Norlin

📄 Building Persistent Page Transitions with WebGPU and Vanilla JS Ben Paine

📄 SolidJS 2.0: A React Developer's First Look at Signals and Async Dennis Morello

🛠 Code & Tools

LiteRT.js: High Performance Web AI Inference from Google — A JavaScript binding of LiteRT for running AI directly inside the web browser, boasting more performance than the TensorFlow.js approach. Here's a CodePen-hosted demo of using it to do image upscaling (surprisingly quickly!)

Yu, Ristić, Soulanille, Parikh (Google)

Full-Text Search in Drizzle Without a Second System — Try the official ParadeDB integration for Drizzle. Search your live Postgres tables. No ETL, no Elasticsearch cluster.

ParadeDB sponsor

Babylon Lite: A Faster, Smaller, WebGPU-Only 3D Engine — Babylon.js is a powerful, long-standing 3D engine, but what would they do if rebuilding from scratch? This! Lite is much faster and smaller, but with some tradeoffs.

Babylon.js Team

Ant: A JavaScript Runtime in a 9MB Binary — No V8, JavaScriptCore or SpiderMonkey involved, this is a JS runtime built in C that ships as a 9MB binary, can run npm packages, and boasts incredibly short cold start times.

theMackabu

🔎 Fuse.js 7.5 – The popular fuzzy search library fixes a variety of scoring and ranking bugs (so ordering may shift for some queries). (Homepage and demo)
Nano ID 6.0 – Tiny, secure, URL-friendly unique string ID generator. nanoid() and customAlphabet() get 4x faster in 6.0.
Mantine Vue – A port of the popular Mantine React component library for use with Vue.

📰 Classifieds

Flaky tests slowing down dev? Meticulous gives engineers confidence to ship faster by autonomously testing every edge case of your web app.

Your dashboard is slow because the query is slow. TimescaleDB extends Postgres for analytics at scale, no second DB.

⚡Sync live context across your entire agent stack. Merget’s now live, build & win a year of Claude Max.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

FracturedJson is a JSON formatter that produces 'human-readable but fairly compact' output. If you have a big lump of JSON, this makes it more pleasant to look through. It also supports non-standard JSON comments.
Cloudflare has unveiled Precursor, a client-side verification system that uses injected JS to collect behavioral signals (e.g. pointer movement) in an attempt to improve bot detection.

🔠 Geist Pixel (above), the latest member of Vercel's Geist family of fonts, is now available to use on Google Fonts.
Devographics, best known for its State of JavaScript surveys, is back with a more general State of Devs survey to take.
A scrolling visualization of the ~200ms life of an HTTP request.

What's new in ECMAScript 2026 (and usable today)

Tue, 7 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#793 — July 7, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Vite+ Beta: A Web Dev Toolchain Behind One Command — Vite+ is the Vite team’s ‘unified toolchain’ that brings Vite, Vitest, Oxlint, and similar tools together under a single vp command, whether for running a dev server, tests, formatting, or bundling.

VoidZero

💡 Vite+ was originally intended to be a commercial project to fund work on Vite and related projects, but was open sourced under the MIT license earlier this year.

Still Writing Tests Manually? Meticulous AI Is Here — Notion, Dropbox, Wiz and LaunchDarkly now use a testing paradigm they can’t work without. Built by former Palantir engineers, Meticulous automatically creates an evolving suite of E2E UI tests, delivering exhaustive coverage with no developer effort.

Meticulous sponsor

What's New in ECMAScript 2026 — The 876 page ECMAScript 2026 spec was approved last week, and this round-up covers several main new features that made the cut, from Array.fromAsync to native Uint8Array Base64/Hex conversion, with examples for each. All are already in browsers and runtimes (except Math.sumPrecise in Node) so you can likely use them today.

Pawel Grzybek

IN BRIEF:

🕹️ js1024, the annual 1KB code-golf competition, is open for entries. The theme is 'dreaming', and you've got 1,024 bytes to make something neat. Here's last year's winner to get a feel for the caliber.
There's a TC39 proposal to standardize a code property on Error (long a de-facto Node convention). Its champion, James Snell, hopes to advance it at this month's plenary.

RELEASES:

vinext 1.0 Beta – Cloudflare's Vite plugin reimplementing Next.js's API surface.
webpack-dev-server 6.0 – The official webpack dev server with live reloading upgrades to Express 5 and native ESM.
Dependency Cruiser 18.0 – Tool to validate and graph project dependencies.
npm 11.18.0, pnpm 11.10

📖 Articles and Videos

Working with AI: A Concrete Example — The creator of htmx reflects on the role of AI in his work with a practical example of using Claude to investigate a bug report. He also touches on how AI fits in with being an ‘older developer’, a topic I rarely see brought up.

Carson Gross

How Medal Cut Its Electron Frontend Bundle from 40MB to 2.7MB — A gaming metaphor heavy tale of slashing an Electron app’s bundle from 40MB+ to 2.7MB using Vite, Rolldown, code splitting, and aggressive dead-code elimination.

Rick Zhang (Medal)

Streaming Real-Time HDR Reflections to Every Device with Miris — Miris built a WebXR car configurator that streams a 1.2GB asset in real-time with HDR reflections across any device.

Miris sponsor

📄 A Guide to Hydration and Rendering Strategies – SSR, streaming, islands, resumability, and RSC, compared. Neciu Dan

📄 WebGL Without a GPU – Useful tips for testing or taking screenshots of WebGL-rendered experiences. Kiko Beats

📄 Understanding TypeScript's Distributive Conditional Types Tejas Bubane

🛠 Code & Tools

Wordgard: A New Rich Text Editor Library from ProseMirror's Creator — With Eloquent JavaScript and ProseMirror under his belt, not many people know more about JavaScript and making good editor controls than Marijn. Modular, supports collaborative editing, and thoughtfully built. Live demo and how to get started.

Marijn Haverbeke

The TypeScript-Native AI Backend for Autonomous Software — Orchestrate agents as typed APIs — then spin up software factories that ship production-grade PRs. Open source.

Agentfield.ai sponsor

Astryx: Meta Open Sources Its Design System — A design system used by 13,000+ apps inside Meta is now open source with 150+ React components, theming options, dark mode, and CLI tooling.

Will npm v12 reject your .npmrc?

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#792 — June 30, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Deno 2.9 Released — A huge release for the runtime: deno desktop turns scripts and framework-based projects into native, self-contained desktop apps, quick migration from npm/pnpm/Yarn/Bun lockfiles, big test runner improvements, ~2x faster cold starts, and a target of Node.js 26 compatibility.

Bartek Iwańczuk

44 Recorded PostgreSQL Talks Are Now Available to Watch — Explore 44 talks about PostgreSQL-backed app development, Postgres performance & AI, Postgres 19, Azure HorizonDB and more. All sessions are available on YouTube. Learn directly from Postgres experts at your own pace. Check out the playlist.

Microsoft | AMD sponsor

Iterating Faster on VS Code with TypeScript 7 — How the VS Code team incrementally adopted the Go-based TypeScript 7 compiler (currently in RC) while it was still being built. Type-checking the source went from 36s to 5s, with npm run watch going from 80s to ~20s.

The VS Code Team (Microsoft)

IN BRIEF:

The second preview release of npm 12 is available for testing. This is worth doing, as Colin McDonnell has already noticed npm 12 hard-errors on unrecognized keys in .npmrc files.
🔒 npm now locks 'high impact accounts' (maintainers of the most popular packages) into a 72-hour read-only mode when they change their email or use a 2FA recovery code.
The Svelte team has just posted the latest monthly Svelte update. In related news, Svelte creator Rich Harris was recently asked ▶️ for his takes on working with AI and Svelte.

RELEASES:

🤖 AI SDK v7 – Vercel's SDK that provides an abstraction for building against any AI model provider.
Node.js v26.4 (Current) adds experimental package map support to resolve packages from a static JSON file instead of walking node_modules.
Formisch v1 RC – Schema-first, headless type-safe form state library.
Prettier 3.9, Rspack 2.1, Electron 43, ESLint 10.6, pnpm 11.9

📖 Articles and Videos

Why Drizzle Couldn't Publish New Releases on npm for a Month — As well as explaining why the creators of the popular ORM ran into the problem, Evert shares some tips to see if you're at risk of the same problem, and how to avoid it entirely.

Evert Pot

The Shifting Line Between CSS States and JavaScript Events — A tour of the (more than you’d think) CSS pseudo-classes that can stand in for JS event listeners, plus a look at the experimental/future event-trigger syntax.

Daniel Schwarz

Real-Time Analytics on Your Operational Postgres Table — Polling just hides the lag. TimescaleDB's continuous aggregates keep data fresh on read. Get $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (Creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

Blocking Install Scripts is Not a Silver Bullet — npm v12 won't run install scripts by default, but Ulises argues that only solves part of the supply chain security problem.

Ulises Gascon

Moving Linear from styled‑components to StyleX — A migration away from a runtime CSS-in-JS approach yielded ~30% faster renders when navigating between pages.

Kenneth Skovhus (Linear)

📺 How Tanner Linsley Built TanStack to Outlive Him – A very smoothly produced 15 minute interview with the creator of TanStack. The Build Log

📄 Benchmarking 5 WebSocket Servers for Node.js Irina Nazarova

📄 Handling Mutations with TanStack Query for Vue Marina Mosti

📄 Parsing Arbitrary Dates in Strings with Chrono and a Web Component Raymond Camden

🛠 Code & Tools

Nub: An All-in-One Toolkit That Augments Node.js — While Bun or Deno can replace Node, this project from Zod’s creator extends Node with nice-to-haves, like fuller TypeScript support, faster & more secure package installation, better .env handling, and a web-standard Worker.

Colin McDonnell et al.

Gea: A Compiler-First Reactive UI Framework — A UI framework that goes all in on "compile the framework away": no VDOM, JSX transformed into string templates, proxy-based stores, and 'surgical' DOM patching. The big win is tiny build sizes.

Armagan Amcalar

Stop Alt-Tabbing to the Dashboard When CI Breaks — Depot CI's new API and CLI let you query runs, pull logs, and diagnose failures without leaving your terminal.

Depot sponsor

<qr-code> 2.0: Web Component for Generating QR Codes — An easy way to display QR codes in the browser using pure JavaScript. A 13 year old solution that’s been modernized and is now ESM only. Live demo.

Eduard Castellano

spartan/ui 1.0: shadcn/ui-Style UI Primitives for Angular — If you’re an Angular developer who’s ever envied the copy and paste simplicity of shadcn/ui, this is for you.

Robin Goetz

Wakaru 1.6 – JavaScript decompiler and bundle splitter. Now with even better 'source-like' output, particularly from bundled React apps.
🎬 TurboRes 1.0 – Fast Zig/WASM-powered Apple ProRes video decoder for JS environments. From the creator of Mediabunny.
📊 ngx-charts 24.0 – Declarative charting framework for Angular. Interactive demo.
GopherJS 1.21.0 – A Go to JavaScript transpiler. Now supporting up to Go 1.21.13.
whatwg-url 17.0 – JS implementation of the WHATWG URL Standard. Demo.

📰 Classifieds

Flaky tests slowing down dev? Meticulous gives engineers confidence to ship faster by autonomously testing every edge case of your web app.

Build TypeScript-first AI agents in your codebase. No timeouts, durable queues, & full tracing. Ship your first agent in minutes with Trigger.dev.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

📊 Frank Denis wanted to see the performance of WebAssembly runtimes in 2026 and pitted nine options against one another, including Bun and Node/V8's options.
GitHub is continuing with efforts to make project management less overwhelming in the agentic era. Now you can restrict issue creation to collaborators with write access.
Meta has ported Flow, the static type checker for its typed dialect of JavaScript, from OCaml to Rust.
The pnpm project is working on pnpr, an experimental pnpm-compatible npm registry server, written in Rust.
Git 2.55 has been released with git history fixup for 'fixing up' earlier commits, faster git status on Linux, and more.
🐘 Postgres 19 is currently in beta, with the final release expected this September. Craig Kerstiens looks ahead to what's interesting in Postgres 19 for users and developers.

Babel 8.0, Vite 8.1, and TypeScript 7.0 RC

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#791 — June 23, 2026

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Desktop Apps With deno desktop — Deno 2.9 (or the 'canary' build now) can turn JavaScript projects into self-contained apps on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Unlike Electron, you can opt to use the default OS WebView or a bundled Chromium backend, plus you get cross-compilation and automatic support for apps built on frameworks like Next.js and SvelteKit.

The Deno Project

📉 It's not in the post, but a --compress option gets packaged app sizes down a lot – from 65MB to 19MB in my test with a basic app.

Catch Runtime Bugs Before Your JS PR Merges — Some JavaScript bugs only show up after the app runs. Greptile reviews each PR with full repo context, runs the code in a sandbox, and returns screenshots, logs, and traces as proof of what broke. Use Greptile in GitHub, GitLab, or from your terminal.

Greptile sponsor

Babel 8.0 Released: The JavaScript Transpiler — It’s been eight years since Babel 7.0, and despite the rise of tools like SWC and Oxc, weekly downloads of the @babel packages have increased 380x since. v8.0 is a modernization release that goes ESM-only and targets ~ES2023 by default (vs ES5 before).

Babel Team

TypeScript 7.0 Release Candidate — A step closer for the Go-powered TypeScript compiler that promises ~10x faster build performance. (I've seen people on social media getting very excited by this.)

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

IN BRIEF:

Cloudflare has added the ability to create and deploy Workers on 'temporary accounts'. Ostensibly 'for AI agents', but you can use them yourself too, and get a Worker running for 60 minutes with no strings attached.
TC39 delegate Luca Casonato has made a proposal to add built-in localized time formatting to <time>, akin to GitHub's <relative-time> element.
🤖 MDN has introduced an official MCP server to provide better access to MDN's up-to-date JS and frontend docs to coding agents.
The Bun team has proposed adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore (a more traditional threading approach versus worker threads).

RELEASES:

⭐ Vite 8.1 – Adds experimental support for 'bundled dev mode' which radically speeds up dev server startup and full reloads on large apps. Also adds WASM/ESM integration support.
⭐ Astro 7.0 – The popular web framework gets faster build times, with .astro compilation and Markdown/MDX processing going through a Rust-powered pipeline. Advanced Routing also gives you full control over the request pipeline.
pnpm 11.7 and 11.8 – pnpm install gets a --dry-run option, --frozen-store adds support for read-only package stores, and more.
Node.js v26.3.1 (Current), v24.17.0 (LTS), and v22.23.0 (LTS)

📖 Articles and Videos

How an Underrated Refactor Saved 90% Memory Usage — The tale of how TanStack Table v9 uses less memory than v8 on large tables, thanks to a simple idea: storing methods on shared prototypes instead of creating them for every object. Benchmarks included, plus a pattern other libraries can copy.

Kevin Van Cott (TanStack)

You Already Know Enough JavaScript to Ship a Real Mobile App — Build for iOS and Android from one codebase with React. Expo handles builds, the App Store, and updates.

Expo sponsor

📄 window.showDirectoryPicker Opens Up a Whole New World – Chrome 86+ added a way to let users open a local directory for use by webapps. Steve Harrison

📄 What are Git Worktrees, And Why Should I Use Them? – A decade-old git feature that's seen a boost in the AI agent era. Cassidy Williams (GitHub)

📄 TanStack Start: A Mental Model for Next.js Devs – Maps TanStack Start onto Next.js concepts with side-by-side code comparisons. Adarsha Acharya

🛠 Code & Tools

FullCalendar 7.0: A Full Sized JavaScript Calendar — A Google Calendar-style experience for your own apps. Works with React, Vue and Angular (v7.0 adds Angular 22 support), but can be used with plain JavaScript. Here’s a demo where you can play with the themes and styling approaches. MIT licensed with commercial extensions.

FullCalendar LLC

🤖 Eve: Like Next.js, But for Building Agents — A new framework from Vercel that provides Next.js-esque structure for building AI-powered agents using TypeScript and Markdown.

Vercel

Your Charts Endpoint Doesn't Need a Second Database — It's the query behind it, not the render. TimescaleDB extends Postgres for analytics. Get $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

ForesightJS 4: Predictive User Intent Library for the Web — Predicts intent from pointer and keyboard cues to prefetch content before it's needed for a snappier user experience. v4.0 adds official React and Vue packages with a declarative <Foresight> component in v4.2.

ForesightJS, Inc.

Prop For That: What JS Knows, Now CSS Knows — Provides CSS with access to values you'd often need JS to provide (e.g. pointer position, time, a slider’s value). Add attributes to HTML and live values show up as custom properties, bridging the JS–CSS gap. The demo page is neat.

Adam Argyle

Kage: Shadow a Website for Offline Viewing — A tool to clone a site and serve it up for offline viewing. The difference vs "Save As" is it handles JS-rendered sites by saving the DOM using a headless browser. Repo.

Duc-Tam Nguyen

goja: An ECMAScript/JavaScript Engine in Pure Go — A mature JavaScript engine for adding scripting functionality to Go apps without CGo/V8.

Dmitry Panov

Anime.js 4.5 – The powerful animation engine adds adapters to support animating non-DOM objects like Three.js meshes or a canvas context.
Ink 7.1 – The popular TUI renderer adds suspendTerminal() for temporarily handing the terminal over to a child process (like an editor).
Nuxt UI 4.9 – The Vue UI library improves its calendar component, adds uniform focus styles, and adds useTour for driving guided tours.
Nx 23.0 – The monorepo tool's yearly major. Now nx migrate can hand migrations off to AI agents.
☀️ SunCalc 2.0 – Calculate the position and phase of the Sun and Moon.

📰 Classifieds

Flaky tests slowing down dev? Meticulous gives engineers confidence to ship faster by autonomously testing every edge case of your web app.

🚀 Take your app from dev to production in one command. clerk deploy handles DNS and OAuth: clerk.com/changelog/2026-06-10-clerk-deploy

Handsontable: Production-ready data grid that feels like Excel. Rock-solid reliability, performance at scale. Try now.

🦊 Extract tables, text, forms, and images from any PDF as structured JSON. Foxit's API combines OCR, layout recognition, and AI parsing.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

A developer code-golfed a signal implementation to just 33 bytes (above). I had to stare at it for a solid minute before it clicked, but mercifully, a Redditor breaks down exactly what's going on.
🔒 GitHub has released actions/checkout v7 that "refuses common pwn request patterns by default" including refusing to fetch fork pull request code in pull_request_target and workflow_run workflows.
If you're a GitHub project maintainer getting flooded with PRs, GitHub now has the ability to limit the number of PRs any single user can open at once.
Tim Wehrle stored a website in a favicon. Why? Why not?