Issue #791: Babel 8.0, Vite 8.1, and TypeScript 7.0 RC

#791 — June 23, 2026

Together with

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?