Issue #793: What's new in ECMAScript 2026 (and usable today)

#793 — July 7, 2026

Together with

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.