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Industry News

05/08/2025
Big Node, VS Code, and Mantine updates





















#​735 — May 9, 2025

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








k6 1.0: Go-Powered Load Testing with JavaScript — A full-featured, configurable load generation tool that uses the Sobek Go-powered JavaScript engine to support writing test scripts in JavaScript. v1.0 promises stability, first-class TypeScript support, and better extensibility.


Grafana Labs






JSON-Powered White-Label Form Builder for Your JavaScript App — Build dynamic JSON-driven forms in your JavaScript application with SurveyJS — a fully customizable, drag-and-drop form-building UI component. It integrates seamlessly with React, Angular, and Vue 3, and has no backend limitations. Perfect for form-heavy apps.


SurveyJS sponsor






Node 24 (Current) Released — Node’s release lines are shifting a little lately – v18 has gone EOL and now v23 gives way to v24 as the ‘Current’ release for when you need the cutting edge features. It comes with npm 11, V8 13.6 (hello RegExp.escape, Float16Array, and Error.isError), the URLPattern API exposed by default, plus Undici 7.


Node.js Team




💡 Technically, Node v24.0.1 is the latest version temporarily reintroducing an EOL feature due to breakages in popular dependencies.





Visual Studio Code Version 1.100 — Not to be confused with a 1.1 release, this update to VS Code has quite a few goodies for JavaScript developers with improved ‘Next Edit Suggestions’ that will suggest adding missing imports, support for Node’s enhanced network debugging capabilities, improved visibility of type information, remote MCP server support, GPT 4.1 as the new default base model, and more.


Microsoft




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




  • 🤖 ESLint v9.26.0 – An interesting release for the popular static analysis tool as it adds support for MCP as a way for ESLint to be used directly by AI models and coding agents.




  • 🗾 Mapbox GL JS 3.12 – Interactive, customizable vector maps in the browser, rendered with WebGL.




  • Relay v19 – Facebook's declarative React/GraphQL framework.




  • Material UI 7.1 – React components using Material Design. Now Tailwind CSS 4 compatible




  • Rspack 1.3.9, Babylon.js 8.7, Electron 36 (official blog post)





📖  Articles





The Power of the Spread and Rest Syntax — A quick run through the opportunities opened up with just three little dots ...


Matt Smith






React Server Components for Astro Developers — Astro’s ‘island’ architecture and React Server Components share a strikingly similar mental model. Dan compares the two, digs into some of the quirks, and suggests Astro offers a ‘gentler onramp’ to some of RSC’s ideas if you’re struggling with them.


Dan Abramov






Wallaby MCP: Deep Runtime Context for Your AI Agent — Wallaby gives your AI agent live execution data, dynamic coverage, and real-time insights to fix and generate tests, and write code with confidence.


Wallaby Team sponsor






Migrating a Project from Prettier and ESLint to Biome — Prettier and ESLint are staples in many JavaScript build processes, but Biome offers an interesting ‘one stop shop’ alternative.


Damilola Olatunji




📄 'Electron Ain't Bad, Actually' – Worth re-reading next time you see the clichéd criticisms of Electron. Vaxry


📺 The React Compiler Explained in Three Minutes Better Stack


📄 You're Misunderstanding DDD in Angular Tomasz Ducin


📄 The Story of Fastify + Vue Jonas Galvez



🛠 Code & Tools








HelloCSV: A Drop-In, CSV Importing Workflow for JS Apps — If you or your users have CSV files to import, here’s a complete CSV importing workflow for the frontend that you can drop into your app. Basic docs.


HelloCSV






PptxGenJS 4.0: Build PowerPoint Presentations with JavaScript — A mature library that outputs standards-compliant Open Office XML files compatible with PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and other common presentation tools. Supports graphics, text, tables, and other typical slide objects. Lots of demos.


Brent Ely






Introducing Clerk Billing — Clerk Billing lets you add B2C/B2B subscriptions with no payment code or UI work—just drop in components and go.


Clerk sponsor






Mantine 8.0: The Full Featured React Components Library — Mantine is one of the most celebrated React components libraries, and for good reason: it’s full featured, modern, and looks great. v8.0 ups its chart game with a little Recharts magic, adds over twenty new components (including a GitHub-style Heatmap, Tree and SemiCircleProgress), submenus, and much more.


Vitaly Rtishchev et al.






Hyparquet: Parquet File Parser for JavaScript — Parquet is a popular column-oriented data file format frequently used for storing large datasets for analysis. Hyparquet is a dependency-free JavaScript library for working with Parquet files, even in the browser (as in this demo).


Hyperparam






🔊 react-sounds: Add Sound Effects to React Apps — Having sound effects on the Web might sound like your idea of a nightmare, but this is a well put together project with delicate, well thought out examples that strike the right tone.


Aedilic Inc.






mono-jsx: <html> as a Response — A server-side JSX runtime that renders <html> to a Response with no build step needed and works across numerous server-side JS runtimes.


Je Xia











📰 Classifieds




Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by Dropbox, Wiz, Lattice, Bilt Rewards, etc.



🕹️ Craft delightful games that change how the world learns as an engineer at Brilliant. Remote/NYC/SF: brilliant.org/careers/






👀  Elsewhere..



Here's a selection of things from the broader ecosystem we've noticed this week:






P.S. If you're into React or Node.js, we focus more directly on those in React Status and Node Weekly respectively, so check out the latest issues of those too :-)










05/01/2025
Making V8 eager to compile your JavaScript





















#​734 — May 2, 2025

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








GSAP v3.13: JavaScript Animation Set Free — Last year the popular GSAP (a.k.a. GreenSock) animation library was acquired by Webflow and as of this new version the entire GSAP toolkit is freely available (including formerly paid addons like MorphSVG and SplitText) even for commercial use. If you're unfamiliar with GSAP and want to see some of what it can do, they have a showcase, lots of code demos, and amazing docs.


Cassie Evans and Jack Doyle




💡 Take care with the license though. GSAP is not formally 'open source' but has a ‘no charge’ license that prevents you using it to directly compete with Webflow.





AG Charts: The Best JavaScript Charting Library in the World — Create beautiful JavaScript Charts in minutes with our open-source library. Built by AG Grid, AG Charts has an intuitive, flexible API, 20+ series types and advanced features, including Financial Charts. Supports React, Angular & Vue. Try for free.


AG Charts sponsor






Converting Values to Strings in JavaScript — When Dr. Axel says “converting values to strings in JavaScript is more complicated than it might seem”, I’m inclined to believe him. An interesting poke about into something seemingly simple you might not think about very much.


Dr. Axel Rauschmayer






📉 Giving V8 a Heads-Up: Faster Startup with Explicit Compile Hints — A look at a V8 optimization that lets you direct V8 to eagerly compile specific files as a way to speed up startup. It ships with Chrome 136 and the performance gains are more compelling than you might expect.


Marja Hölttä




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




📖  Articles








Export Google Analytics Data to Google Sheets via Apps Script — Google Apps Script is a JavaScript-based platform for dynamically automating tasks in all sorts of Google apps. Here’s how to use it to bring Google Analytics data into a Google Sheet.


Kayce Basques






Building an Offline-Friendly Image Upload System — How to leverage PWA tech such as IndexedDB, service workers, and the Background Sync API to help improve the reliability of web apps for users, particularly those with unreliable internet connectivity.


Amejimaobari Ollornwi






How to Take Clerk to Production — How to take a Clerk app to production with custom domains, OAuth credentials, and DNS setup.


Clerk sponsor






What Does React's 'use client' Do? — Dan Abramov takes a practical look at how to think about the use client and use server directives React Server Components introduced and how they let you elegantly structure a client/server app as “a single program spanning two environments” – a concept that Dan thinks could be more widely used, even outside of React.


Dan Abramov




📄 Deno’s Decline? – A critical view of Deno’s Deno Deploy edge platform which has been steadily dropping regions. David Bushell


📺 How to Detect Memory Leaks in Your Web App Decoded Frontend


📄 Pwning the Ladybird Browser – The vector is Ladybird’s LibJS JavaScript engine. Jess



🛠 Code & Tools









PDFSlick 3.0: View and Interact with PDF Documents in JS Apps — A full-featured PDF viewer for React, Solid, Svelte and vanilla JS apps. Built on top of PDF.js, it offers a wide array of features from simple PDF viewing to working with multiple and large documents with annotations. Demo. v3.0 bumps up to PDF.js v5 with ICC profile support, better JPEG 2000 support, and improved rendering of large pages.


Vancho Stojkov






Koa 3.0: The Expressive HTTP Middleware Framework — Koa first appeared a decade ago as a ‘next-generation’ Web framework that shared some of the lineage of Express.js, but leaning on more modern JS features. While Express has been making a comeback, Koa remains a compelling alternative.


Koa contributors






Your Terminal, Evolved — The new agentic CLI from AWS works with you to write files locally, run bash commands, or call AWS APIs. Start for free!


Amazon sponsor






Seyfert: A Framework for Building Discord Bots — Create bots for the popular chat system starting from bots that respond to simple commands up to creating components and getting user input. Supports Deno, Bun, and Node.


socram03






Storybook 9 Beta — A strong step forward for the UI ‘frontend workshop’ with several experimental features from Storybook 8 becoming stable. v9 has a strong focus on component testing, plus React Native support.


Michael Shilman






PGlite 0.3: Postgres but in WebAssembly — A WebAssembly-based build of the Postgres SQL database meaning you can run it wherever WebAssembly can be run (such as in the browser as in this demo).


ElectricSQL






  • pretty-bytes 7.0 – Convert a size in bytes into a human readable equivalent (e.g. 1337 → 1.34 kB).




  • QuickJS 2.2 – Execute JavaScript code in a WebAssembly QuickJS sandbox.




  • Piscina 5.0 – Popular Node.js worker thread pool.




  • Jira.js 5.0 – A wrapper for Jira's numerous APIs.




  • NodeBB 4.3 – Node.js-powered forum system.










📰 Classifieds




Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by Dropbox, Wiz, Lattice, Bilt Rewards, etc.



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






📢  Elsewhere



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




  • Redis is open source again! The popular Redis in-memory data store ran into a bit of drama in recent years with a license change following its acquisition. The good news is that an AGPL license is now an option for the new Redis 8 release making Redis truly 'open source again.'




  • TypeScript ←→ C#: I've been dabbling with a little C# recently (it's the main language used in Unity game development) and enjoyed this TypeScript is Like C# guide oriented largely around showing TypeScript/JavaScript vs C# examples of doing the same things.




  • ❤️ JS + HTML: It's a simple thing, but Simon Willison reminds us that static HTML enriched with JavaScript and served up on GitHub Pages is one of the best ways you can give software freely for the world to use.




  • Emulators-a-plenty: Tiny Emus is a showcase of almost 200 emulators that run in the browser, largely for 8 bit platforms, games, and even some visual CPU demos.




  • CSS shapes: Did you know CSS now has a shape() function for drawing complex shapes for clipping paths?












04/24/2025
Bring back the fun with p5.js 2.0





















#​733 — April 25, 2025

Read on the Web




JavaScript Weekly








p5.js 2.0: The JavaScript Library for Creative Coding — A popular Processing-inspired creative coding library that makes it easy to create interactive, visual experiences (examples). v2.0 improves its font support, adds more ways to draw and manipulate text, adds a way to write shaders in JavaScript, and much more. p5.js 2.0: You Are Here has more details on the release and where the project is headed next.


p5.js Team




💡 p5.js is simultaneously useful and fun. It provides a great abstraction for interactive, visual experiences and is easy to play with using its online editor. A pastime of mine is asking AI models to create demos. For example, load this p5.js sketch and hit play to see a JS logo glitch experiment OpenAI's o3 just made for me.





Unbork Your Laravel App (Live) — Laravel is so in right now. Join us for a hands-on debugging session using a demo app, Unborked. We’ll track errors, replay sessions, trace slowdowns, and maybe even let the robots help. Bring your bugs.


Sentry sponsor






Big Updates in the React World — You know it’s been a big week in the React world when the React Compiler hitting Release Candidate is the second most important story. In this latest React Labs post, we learn about two new features ready to try out today in react@experimental: View Transitions and the <Activity> component.


Ricky Hanlon




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




📖  Articles









Creating a 3D Split-Flap Display with JavaScript — A split-flap display is a electro-mechanical display commonly associated with live timetable displays and it makes for a neat effect on the Web too. Jhey breaks down how to replicate it, or you can hit up this live demo.


Jhey Tompkins






Impossible Components — Dan Abramov digs into the idea of so-called ‘impossible’ components that mix server-only and client-only features and how React Server Components can help bridge the divide, culminating in an example you can experiment with for yourself.


Dan Abramov






How to Build a Multi-Tenant App Using Clerk + Supabase — Clerk and Supabase empower you to build B2B apps with only a few small changes to your codebase. Learn how in this guide.


Clerk sponsor






Optimizing Node Performance with V8 GC Optimization — Matteo recently ▶️ gave a talk about Node’s memory usage and has written it up into this blog post. He notes that high memory usage doesn’t necessarily mean you have a memory leak, explains how V8’s garbage collection works, and how to tune things for your own use case.


Matteo Collina






Abusing DuckDB-WASM by Making SQL Draw 3D Graphics (Sort Of) — Oh, this is a fun experiment. DuckDB is a small and powerful in-process SQL database (think SQLite but for analytical tasks) and has a native WebAssembly build. Couple that with some JavaScript, and you too could do some rather bizarre things..


Patrick Trainer




💡 Lest you think this is just a fun item, you could use the techniques learnt here to integrate DuckDB more seriously into other Web projects.



📄 A Decade of Impact: How Our npm Packages Hit 1 Billion Downloads and Shaped JavaScript – A bold title for sure, but with a neat story behind it. Forward Email


📄 Float16Array in JavaScript – Understanding the 16-bit floating point array type. Trevor I. Lasn


📄 When to Use map() vs. forEach() Matt Smith


📄 Zero-Config Debugging with Deno and OpenTelemetry Casonato and Jiang (Deno)



🛠 Code & Tools








JavaScript Font Picker — A surprisingly featureful control for letting users pick fonts from a range of system fonts, Google fonts, and custom fonts of your choice. You can play with a code demo here or go to the GitHub repo.


Zygomatic




🎨 The folks behind this project have also built JS Color Picker.





Scala.js 1.19.0: A Way to Bring Scala and JavaScript Together — Scala is a powerful language that never quite seemed to make it big to me, but it has a devoted fanbase and has grown beyond its JVM roots to also have JavaScript and native runtimes. Scala.js is a Scala to JavaScript compiler and the homepage has some neat code and feature comparisons.


Scala.js Team






Penpot Launches Native Design Tokens! — Simplify your design & code collaboration with Penpot design tokens: the key to consistency and scalability.


Penpot sponsor






Spectacle: Create Sleek React-Powered Presentations — A React-based library for creating sleek presentations using JSX syntax that gives you the ability to live demo your code, add interactive elements, scrollable code blocks, graphics effects, and more.


Nearform






Frimousse: A Lightweight, Unstyled, and Composable Emoji Picker for React — The picker is accessible and won’t display any emojis that aren’t supported on the device. You can explore some demos here.


liveblocks











📰 Classifieds




Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by Dropbox, Wiz, Lattice, Bilt Rewards, etc.



✉️ FYI: We publish two other JavaScript related newsletters if you work with Node.js or React: Node Weekly and React Status.






📢  Elsewhere



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











04/17/2025
TC39: No to records and tuples, yes to enums





















#​732 — April 18, 2025

Read on the Web


🥚 A Good Friday, if you celebrate Easter at all. We're taking a little break but didn't want to take the entire week off, so we have a slimline issue for you today :-) We'll be back to full service next Friday!
__
Peter Cooper, your editor





JavaScript Weekly








The ECMAScript Records and Tuples Proposal Has Been Withdrawn — Several years in the making, the record and tuples proposal offered two new deeply immutable data structures to JavaScript, but at this week’s TC39 meeting, the consensus was to drop it.





There have, however, been some more positive updates:



It's worth following Rob Palmer if you want to keep up to date with TC39 goings-on as he's always sharing the latest news.







Plug & Play Image Editor For Your Web App — Save yourself the headache of building an image editor. Import the pintura module, give it an image source, and instantly get features like cropping, rotating, resizing, and annotation. Need help? Support has you covered. Try it for free today.


Pintura sponsor







Hako: A New High-Performance Embeddable JavaScript Engine — A fork of PrimJS (which is, itself, built on top of QuickJS) that compiles down to WebAssembly and can act as a portable, embeddable JavaScript engine for other apps (here’s an example of using it in a Go app).


Andrew Sampson




IN BRIEF:





RELEASES:




  • Astro 5.7 – The popular content framework gains an experimental fonts API, its sessions API is now stable, and there's support for using local SVG files as components.




  • WebStorm 2025.1 – JetBrains' JavaScript IDE – fresh with big AI, Angular, monorepo, and Next.js enhancements.




  • tldts 7.0 – URL parsing library to extract domains, subdomains, suffixes, etc.




  • gridstack.js 12.0 – Build responsive interactive dashboards quickly.




  • Lexe – Package a Node app into a single, small executable.




  • DOCX 9.4 – Generate Word documents from JavaScript.




  • Redux Toolkit 2.7, Bun v1.2.10, Babylon.js 8.3, Rambda 10.0





📖  Articles and Videos








A Flowing WebGL Gradient, Deconstructed — Even if you don’t want to render a neat plasma-style effect on the Web, this is a wonderfully deep exploration of the math and technology behind doing so using simple GLSL code that could be easily understood by any JavaScript developer.


Alex Harri




💡 If you like stuff like this, this CodePen of a GLSL-based swirl effect is neat too.





Advanced React in the Wild — A round-up of case studies showing how five different engineering teams have pushed React to the limit in production and their real-world wins in areas like performance, Core Web Vitals, caching, and more. A lot to enjoy here.


Addy Osmani and Hassan Djirdeh




📺 Building Single Page Apps with SvelteKit – And not only that, you can create SvelteKit apps in a single HTML file that can run without a Web server. (15 minutes) Stanislav Khromov


📄 How I Track My Blog’s Analytics with Val Town Orestis Papadopoulos


📄 Deploying TypeScript: Recent Advances and Possible Future Directions Dr. Axel Rauschmayer


📄 Zero-Config Debugging with Deno and OpenTelemetry Casonato and Jiang (Deno)


📄 Creating an AI Chat Experience with React and OpenAI Robin Wieruch