☀️ We're back after a week off, though I'm starting to think we should have taken two weeks off as it's been quite quiet in JavaScript-land this August! Nevertheless, we still have a full issue for you today, so let's get on to it.. ;-) __ Peter Cooper, your editor
JavaScript Weekly
Eliminating JavaScript Cold Starts on AWS Lambda — Porffor is a rapidly developing ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler with a major benefit being extremely quick process launch times (think sub-millisecond). This is certainly more a taste of the future, and something to experiment with, rather than something you want to imminently deploy into production.
jQuery 4.0.0 Release Candidate 1 — Version 4.0 of jQuery has reached the “we think this is ready; now poke it with many sticks” stage. While jQuery is still heavily used, we know it’s old-fashioned, but it was so important in the early days of JavaScript Weekly that we have a major soft spot for it!
Timmy Willison
Reflections on the React Community — Lee, formerly of Vercel and widely recognized for his influence on Next.js and React, shares candid reflections on the React community, digging into the rise of React Server Components, the tension between commercial and non-commercial priorities, the toll of burnout, and a reminder that, above all, this is still a community of people.
Lee Robinson
IN BRIEF:
Minification Benchmarks is a frequently updated benchmark of different JavaScript minifiers, with cminify being the newest addition.
Using the Custom Highlight API — The CSS Custom Highlight API offers a way to style text ranges on a document using JavaScript to create the ranges, and CSS to style them. And, as of Firefox 140, all major browsers now support it. This could be great for in-page search or even dynamic syntax highlighting.
▶ React Mock Interview: Three Devs Take on a Challenge — Three top developers take on the same React challenge to build a form complete with validation. If you’ve got the time for a 50 minute video, this is fun and educational.
Uppy 5.0: A Powerful, Modular JavaScript File Uploader — Upload not just from local sources (whether files or a webcam) but also remote services like Dropbox or Google Drive. Integrates with frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, and Angular, and supports resumable uploads too. GitHub repo.
Minecraft MCP Server: Let an LLM Take Control of Minecraft — A fun way to play around with MCP servers and LLMs. It uses Mineflayer, a JavaScript API for creating Minecraft bots, behind the scenes. The video in the README is cool, showing how Claude and this server can turn a photo of the White House into an in-world creation.
Yuniko Software
Waku 0.25 – The minimal React framework introduces the concept of 'slice components' – a new approach to fine-grained component rendering.
Retire.js 5.3 – A security scanning tool to detect the use of JavaScript libraries with known vulnerabilities in your project.
Ky 1.9 – Simple HTTP client based upon Fetch for browsers, Node & Deno.
Repomix 1.3 – Pack an entire repository into a single, LLM-friendly file.
☀️ We're taking next week off, so this will be the last issue until Friday, August 22. Just a little summer vacation. __ Peter Cooper, your editor
JavaScript Weekly
Apache ECharts 6.0: The Powerful Data Visualization Library — 12 years on from its first release, ECharts takes another big step forward. Visualization types span from line, bar and pie charts to 3D graphs, calendars and Sankey diagrams. v6 brings an all-new design language, dynamic theme switching, dark mode support, even more chart types, and more. Be sure to enjoy the 100+ demos and the GitHub repo.
▶ How JavaScript Really Evolves: Inside TC39 with Daniel Ehrenberg — A well-recorded 47 minute in-person conversation with one of the most productive members of the TC39 committee covering not just some of the newest features coming to JavaScript, but also the way TC39 works and how you can get involved and propose ideas and help the language move forward.
How V8's JSON.stringify Got Over 2x Faster — The V8 team has turbo-charged JSON.stringify, giving apps an automatic performance boost for numerous common tasks when using V8 13.8 onwards (such as in Chrome 138). This article unpacks the low-level work behind the speedup.
"JavaScript Isn’t the Problem, Replacing the Browser Was" — The creator of RedwoodSDK, a React framework for building server-side apps on Cloudflare, suggests SPA-style development was a compromise to work around platform limitations, and now a server-first approach makes good sense.
MathJax v4.0: A JS Display Engine for Math in Browsers — Several years in the making, MathJax reasserts its position as one of the best Web-based math rendering approaches. There is, of course, a live demo. v4.0 adds more fonts, a better default font, line-breaking support, ESM support, and much more.
Cervone, Sorge, et al.
Panda CSS 1.0: Modern, Build-Time, Type-Safe CSS-in-JS — A DX-focused CSS-in-JS approach from the creator of Chakra UI that offers build-time generated styles and type safety out of the box. It works with Remix, Vite, Next.js, Astro, and even server components.
zx v8.8: Write Better Shell Scripts with Node.js — A popular way to make shell scripting a more pleasant experience in Node with useful wrappers around child_process, argument escaping, and sensible defaults. v8.8 improves zx’s piping story. (Docs.)
Did you know we also publish Frontend Focus? It focuses more on the browser end of things: CSS, WebGL, HTML, etc.
🎁 Some Bonus Items
AwesomeIndex(above) provides a way to search hundreds of 'awesome'-style curated link lists at once. This idea has a lot of potential, as those lists are crammed full of useful resources.
r2dec-js is a JavaScript-based decompiler that converts assembly code into 'pseudo-C' for learning purposes.
Bali is an attempt at creating a JavaScript lexer, parser, and interpreter in the Nim language.
👀 Do you miss ActionScript 3.0 and Flex? No? This week, I learned Apache is keeping the dream alive with Apache Royale.
Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview — The Observable Framework and the new Notebook Kit are just two parts of a rich ecosystem of reactive JavaScript ‘notebook’-style tools for creating data visualizations (example) and dashboards, originally created by Mike Bostock. This v2 release previews a big step forward with a new notebook file format based on HTML and, for the first time, support for true vanilla JavaScript, complete with the ability to import libraries with import. Here’s another neat example showing off the potential. There are a lot of parts here, so dig in.
The Many JavaScript Runtimes of the Last Decade — A fantastic, well-researched look at the myriad of JavaScript runtimes and engines both past and present, from mainstream picks like Node.js and Bun, to cloud platforms and some more obscure ‘honorable mentions’. A perfect way to round out your knowledge of JavaScript’s runtime story.
Whatever, Jamie
Node.js v22.18 (LTS) Gets Type Stripping by Default — We wouldn’t normally feature a minor Node.js LTS release, but this one comes with a big tweak: type stripping/TypeScript support is enabled by default, making node app.ts a reality, much as with Bun or Deno.
Antoine du Hamel
💡 Node v24.5 (Current) has also been released, with node:http(s) now supporting proxies, OpenSSL 3.5, and --experimental-wasm-modules unflagged.
⭐ pnpm 10.14 – The alternative, efficient package manager adds the ability to declare a Node.js, Deno or Bun version in package.json and have it installed and pinned automatically.
Node-RED 4.1 – Powerful JS-based low-code flow-based platform for building event-driven apps.
Ionic 8.7 – Cross-platform mobile app development framework.
▶ Zod vs. Valibot: A JS/TS Validator Battle — You know it’s good when the creator of Zod comments: “incredible video. honestly blown away by how succinct and clear you made everything.” (12 minutes.)
Jack Herrington
Compile Svelte 5 in Your Head — Svelte does things a little differently to most UI frameworks by compiling code to components ahead-of-time, but what is it actually doing at the code level?
TanStack DB: The Embedded Client Database for TanStack Query — One for team React! TanStack DB is an embedded client‑side database that uses differential dataflow to power live, relational queries, sub‑ms incremental updates, and optimistic writes. This post is a great pitch, and the first beta is available now.
🔍 Discover KeyLines - a scalable JavaScript graph visualization toolkit that turns complex data into actionable insights.
🎁 Some Bonus Items
Google has unveiled a new open-licensed code font called Google Sans Code. It has a 'soft' feel to it and is inspired by Google's branding. It's available on Google Fonts too, if you want to quickly plug it into a site.