~javascriptweekly | Bookmarks (194)

PDFSlick 2.2: View and Interact with PDF Documents — A full-featured PDF viewer for React, Solid, Svelte and other JS apps. Built on top of PDF.js, it uses Zustand to provide a reactive store for documents. Demo.

Instrument, Monitor, Fix: A Hands-On Debugging Class — Join us for a hands-on session where you’ll build it, watch it break, debug it, and go from “no idea what’s wrong” to fixing issues.

TanStack Form v1.0: Headless, Type-Safe Form State Management — A type-safe, framework agnostic (React, Vue, Angular, Solid and Lit are all supported out of the box), headless and isomorphic way to create and work with forms, with this v1.0 release over two years in the making. If you already use things like Formik or React Hook Form and are wondering how it differs, here’s...

React Data Table: Responsive Dynamic Table Component — Simple and clean, but flexible. Includes features like column sorting and pagination out of the box. Lots of demos and code examples. GitHub repo.

Electron App Boilerplate with Modern Dependencies — A basic template app that uses React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Electron Vite, Biome, and includes a GitHub Actions release workflow.

Lynx: A Fresh Way to Build Apps from Web Technologies — Lynx is a new set of tools for building JavaScript-powered native and Web apps that draws inspiration from React Native but aims to be more modular and flexible (and eventually framework agnostic). It comes from, and is used by, TikTok, and comes with its own QuickJS-based JavaScript engine.

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 — Four months in the making, TypeScript 5.8 lands with a strong Node focus. You can now use require() for ES modules in the nodenext module, there’s a new node18 module for developers who want to keep targeting Node 18, and most notably there’s now an --erasableSyntaxOnly option to ensure no TypeScript-only runtime semantics can be used.

JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back — A developer with ‘a decade away’ from writing JavaScript returns to find that one thing hasn’t changed: “Choosing the right JavaScript framework is hard, man.”

React Native 0.78 Released — A big release for React Native as it ships React 19 support (which requires some tweaks when upgrading) and some more minor tweaks.

Random: Seedable Random Number Generator — You’ve got Math.random but this library takes things a few steps further with easy ways to create random values of various types and using different distributions (e.g. normal distribution, Bernoulli, Poisson, Pareto and Weibull).

QuickJS Sandbox 2.0: Execute JS/TS in a QuickJS Powered Sandbox — QuickJS is a small, embeddable JavaScript engine built by Fabrice Bellard and this extends it to make it easy to run code in an isolated sandboxed environment, along with some basic Node module support and a virtual file system. GitHub repo.

Svelvet 11: Build Node-Based UIs with Svelte — A mature Svelte component library for creating interactive node-based UIs and diagrams. v11 adds the ability to toggle between ‘snap grid’ and freeform modes for manipulating elements. (There’s a live demo at the bottom of the homepage.)

Developer Implements 'Doom' in TypeScript's Type System — A curious quirk of TypeScript’s type system is that it is Turing-complete which has led some developers to implement apps entirely in the type system. One such developer has spent eighteen months producing 177 terabytes of types to get 1993’s Doom running with them. Ridiculous and amazing in equal measure, he ▶️ explains the project in this...

Functional JavaScript First Steps, v2 — A friendly, practical introduction to functional programming fundamentals in JavaScript. Learn the power of the pure function while exploring functional programming paradigms.

Bun v1.2.3 and v1.2.4 Released — The rapid pace of progress on the JavaScriptCore-based runtime is only increasing. v1.2.3 pushes frontend dev server features (run bun ./index.html and all the bundling is done for you). bun init can now be used to create a new React project. Meanwhile, Bun 1.2.4 builds macOS apps 60% faster and macOS executables can now be code signed.

What is TypeScript? An Overview for JavaScript Programmers — You may have noticed esteemed JavaScript developer and author Dr. Axel has been on a TypeScript odyssey recently. Here he does a good job at boiling down the what (rather than the ‘why’) of TypeScript. A handy primer on what’s going on, even if you don’t plan to use it, since you'll end up interacting...

React Libraries for 2025 — Each year, prolific React blogger Robin updates his post covering his opinionated list of essential React ecosystem libraries. He covers a lot of angles from project creation and package management through to state management, animation, form creation, auth, and i18n.

Turbocharging V8 with Mutable Heap Numbers — The V8 team uses the JetStream2 benchmark suite to investigate performance issues and has implemented a new optimization yielding not just a 2.5x improvement in the async-fs benchmark but in other areas too.

Subverting Control with Weak References — A weak reference differs from a normal reference in that it doesn’t prevent a referenced object from being garbage collected. Most modern JS runtimes support them and James shows how they can be useful.

TC39 Advances 3 Proposals to Stage 4 — I love seeing Rob Palmer’s tweets about TC39’s progression of JavaScript proposals and this is a good roundup from this week’s meeting in Seattle. Areas covered include near-term features like Float16Array and import defer to more distant things like Math.clamp and Error.captureStackTrace entering stage 1.

Heat.js: A Heat Map Visualization Library — Think the GitHub contributions heat map. No dependencies, small, responsive, and theme-able. There’s a live demo or its GitHub repo.

Find. Fix. Test: An Intro to App Monitoring with Sentry — Code-level visibility, from pre- to post-release, lets devs find and fix errors and slowdowns and deploy with confidence.

Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties? — I know this sounds like a geographical piece, but this developer’s curiosity led to a fun blend of JavaScript and the always useful Overpass Turbo mapping tool.

Interop 2025: Features Browser Devs Will Focus on This Year — Interop is an ongoing process where browser devs cooperate on improving features in concert so more Web users can use those features sooner. This year’s focus points include the Storage Access API, pointer/mouse events, phasing out old mutation events, the scrollend event, URLPattern, and more JS/WASM integration.