JavaScript Weekly

The coding challenge you don't want to pass

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

#795 — July 21, 2026

JavaScript Weekly

Framework Benchmarks: Compare Frontend Frameworks — An experienced developer built and benchmarked the same app across numerous frameworks (e.g. Angular, Solid, React, Alpine.js…). Here are the results, covering bundle size, build time, UX metrics, and more.

Alicia Sykes

💡 Alicia also created Stack Match, a page that lets you specify your criteria for a framework and shows the best matches. Vue usually wins though!

xyOps: Open Source Ops Automation, from the Cronicle Team — Run jobs across your fleet, build visual runbooks, monitor live metrics, and trigger alerts, tickets, snapshots, or follow-up actions. Self-hosted, BSD licensed, and all app features are included. Auto-import from Cronicle.

xyOps sponsor

Nuxt 4.5 Released: The Full-Stack Vue Framework — Daniel Roe calls it the biggest release in a while: Vite 8, Rspack 2, experimental SSR streaming, a new useLayout composable, and a lot of preparation for Nuxt 5. Nuxt 3 users take note: it goes end of life July 31.

Nuxt Team

IN BRIEF:

Vue 3.6 is now in Release Candidate stage – Vapor Mode, first teased over two years ago, is now feature complete and ready to go.
Angular is switching to a yearly release cadence, with v23 scheduled for June 2027, a year after v22 dropped.
ESLint now offers official 'codemods' for automating ESLint version migrations, with v8→v9 and v9→v10 available.
🇫🇷 An official Three.js conference is coming to Paris, France, this September 10-11. Three.js developer Mr.doob will, of course, be there.

RELEASES:

Preact 11.0 Beta 2 – "One of the last betas for Preact 11," says maintainer Jovi De Croock. There's already a migration guide ready to use.
WebStorm 2026.2 – JetBrains' JavaScript IDE adds TypeScript 7 support, and enhances support for Svelte and Vue.
Astro 7.1, Rslint 0.7, Rolldown 1.2, actions/setup-node@v7

📖 Articles and Videos

How a Fake Interview's Coding Challenge Steals Credentials — A dissection of a North Korean campaign that hides malware inside SVG images in a fake job interview's JavaScript 'coding challenge'. The targeting of job-seeking devs is on the increase, as Roman Imankulov recently discovered first-hand.

Daniel Stepanic (Elastic)

Creating Your First Streamed 3D Asset in Under 10 Minutes — Generate a streamable 3D asset, preview it in-browser, and share it. No code, no viewer downloads.

Miris sponsor

Handling Concurrency on the Web with Web Locks API — The Web Locks API is a widely available browser API to allow tabs or workers with the same origin to hold and release locks.

Cesar Contreras

Engineering High-Performance Parsers with Data-Oriented Design — A look into how data-oriented design helped build Yuku, a JavaScript parser that's faster than alternatives like Oxc, SWC or Babel (you can give it a spin here).

Arshad Yaseen

💡 The article is largely about building a parser in Zig but the underlying Yuku and Yuku Analyzer projects are worth checking out.

📄 HTML in Canvas: Rendering Real DOM Inside <canvas> Agustin Barrientos

📺 The Framework Wars are Over: Why No One Dethroned React – Kent's take in 11 minutes. Kent C. Dodds

🛠 Code & Tools

Flint: Chart Specs that Compile to Vega-Lite, ECharts, or Chart.js — A Microsoft project that compiles a simple, declarative JSON-based spec of a data visualization into a form that Vega-Lite, ECharts or Chart.js can render. It's pitched at agentic use, but is a simple intermediate format humans could benefit from too.

Microsoft Research

Query Live Data. Skip the Analytics Pipeline — TimescaleDB extends Postgres for real-time analytics at scale. No second system, no pipeline. Get $1000 credit to start.

Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor

unwasm: Import .wasm Files Like Any Other ES Module — Build-time tooling for when WASM is part of a bundled app and you want it to feel more like a normal module (e.g. import { sum } from "sum.wasm").

unjs

BotKit: Build Standalone ActivityPub Bots — A way to run a bot (or multiple bots) that Mastodon users can see and follow but without needing an account anywhere. Write it all in JavaScript and self-host with Deno, Node.js or even Cloudflare Workers.

Fedify

🎨 Color.js 0.7: 'Let’s Get Serious About Color' — A fantastic library for working with colors, following the latest specs. v0.7 is a big update with support for new color spaces, a new gamut mapping method, and a smarter display() fallback for colors not natively supported by a browser.

Lea Verou and Chris Lilley

Travels 2.1 – Efficient framework-agnostic undo/redo library based on JSON patches rather than snapshots.
gridstack.js 13.0 – Mature library for creating responsive dashboard layouts with drag-and-drop support.
np 12.0 – Sindre Sorhus's "better npm publish" adds support for npm 12 and staged publishing.
AngularEditor 3.1 – Simple WYSIWYG rich text editor for Angular 22+. (Demo)
Pinia 4.0 – Vue's state-management library gets leaner and goes ESM-only.
Bolt 5.0 – Slack's official framework for building Slack apps.

📰 Classifieds

🤖 If you can code, you can build a robot. Viam 101 is a free 90-min course — no hardware needed. Sign up by July 31 to win a $3,500 arm.

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

Drowning in AI dev tools? You really only need these 3 tools to ship mobile apps: skills, MCP, and your workflow. Read the guide.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Famously, the only thing Java gave JavaScript was the first four letters of its name. That goes unmentioned in ▶️ this new documentary about Java (74 minutes), but I enjoyed learning Java's story anyway. It's from the same folks as the fantastic Vite, Angular, and Node.js documentaries.
🤖 ReactBench is a new coding agent evaluation based around models' abilities to build working, realistic React apps. GPT 5.6 leads the way for now.
shadcn/typeset is a typography system for rendered HTML that makes font styling and spacing simpler to configure.
Cloudflare has entirely rebuilt its blog on top of EmDash, the Astro-powered 'spiritual successor to WordPress' it unveiled (genuinely) on April 1.
🕹️ If you want to take part in the next js13kGames game dev competition, the theme will be announced on August 13 with submissions due September 13.
✨ An updated list of the top 100 starred JavaScript projects on GitHub.

npm 12, TypeScript 7, and Bun in Rust

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

#794 — July 14, 2026

Read on the Web

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

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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.