Every JavaScript engine all at once
#761 — November 14, 2025
JavaScript Weekly
JavaScript Engines Zoo: Learn About Over 100 JS Engines — I’m a sucker for a big table of data and this is about as big as it gets when it comes to JavaScript engines. See how various engines compare, sort them by performance, or click on an engine’s name to learn more about its development, history, and end users. The project’s repo also has Dockerfiles for trying each of them out.
Ivan Krasilnikov
💡 Sticking with a theme, I’ve always enjoyed this ECMAScript compatibility table where you can see cross-browser and runtime support for different JavaScript features.
FlexGrid by Wijmo: The Industry-Leading JavaScript Datagrid — A fast and flexible datagrid for building modern web apps. Key features and virtualized rendering are included in the core grid module. Pick & choose special features to keep your app small. Built for JavaScript, extended to Angular, React, and Vue.
Wijmo From MESCIUS sponsor
Valdi: Snap’s Newly-Open Cross-Platform UI Framework — The team behind Snapchat has open sourced this cross-platform UI framework that it’s used in its production apps for eight years: “Write your UI once in declarative TypeScript, and it compiles directly to native views on iOS, Android, and macOS—no web views, no JavaScript bridges.”
Snap
💡 Valdi’s FAQ answers several questions you might have, including how it works and why you might pick Valdi over React Native.
IN BRIEF:
The TC39 committee behind ECMAScript is meeting for the 111th time next week and has a packed agenda to discuss. (Thanks to Rob Palmer for the heads up.)
For Stack Overflow, Tanya Janca shares several tips for writing more secure JavaScript.
The co-founder of the fantastic Val Town online JavaScript platform shares a retrospective of its past three years, as well as two roles they’re hiring for.
Visual Types is a handy visually-oriented guide/tour of what types are and how they work, with a focus on TypeScript.
RELEASES:
Bun v1.3.2 – Isolated package installs, introduced as the default in v1.3, were causing issues with some existing projects, so now hoisted installs are back as the default for those. bun install also gets even faster and you can do CPU profiling by running with –cpu-prof.
Node.js v25.2.0 (Current) – Now with type stripping marked as stable.
esbuild 0.27 – Popular bundler. A notable release for having breaking changes (so you’re reminded to pin esbuild appropriately).
TanStack DB 0.5, Node.js v24.11.1 (LTS), MikroORM 6.6
📖 Articles and Videos
▶ The State of Node.js in 2025, Explained — A thirty-minute talk from JSNation earlier this year where TSC member Matteo Collina presented an update on Node’s still-growing popularity, release schedule, security, recent performance enhancements, the permissions system, and more.
GitNation
V8’s Garbage Collector Developments in Recent Years — Andy, who’s worked on both V8 and JavaScriptCore in the past, reviews the major developments in the V8 engine’s garbage collector over the past couple of years. Very technical, but a valuable piece of history.
Andy Wingo
Build Type-Safe APIs for Your JS Apps: Protobuf Workshop with Buf Team — Learn how Protobuf brings type safety across your stack from Node.js APIs to frontend clients. Live Q&A with Buf engineers.
Buf sponsor
Comparing Electron vs. Tauri for Building and Distributing a Desktop App — A team working on an open-source desktop app built using JavaScript and Electron took a look into the Rust-based Tauri instead, with mixed, but mostly positive, results.
Eric Richardson
Using Expo for React Native Development in 2025: A Perspective — Expo has essentially become to React Native what Next.js became to React. But is it well suited for you? Jack weighs the pros and cons.
Jack Rosa
📄 How We Catch UI Bugs Early with Visual Regression Testing – Using Playwright and its visual comparisons feature. Tommaso Ruscica
📺 Learn JavaScript by Building ‘Mario’ – One of Ania’s typically easy to follow, comprehensive tutorials. Ania Kubow
📄 Building a 3D Infinite Carousel with Reactive Background Gradients Clément Grellier
📄 Error Chaining in JS: Cleaner Debugging with Error’s cause Matt Smith
🛠 Code & Tools
imgui-react-runtime: React + Dear ImGui + Static Hermes — When the author teased a demo of this on X a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure if it would get released, but here it is. A new way to put together native apps using React and the popular lightweight GUI library Dear ImGui.
Tzvetan Mikov
ESLint Plugin for Baseline JavaScript — The winner of last month’s Baseline Tooling Hackathon is an ESLint plugin that flags code that’s using features newer than your configured Baseline target (features broadly supported by modern browsers).
Ryuya Hasegawa
Customizable JavaScript Libraries for Forms & Surveys — Create branded, dynamic forms with full control over design, logic, and data storage.
SurveyJS sponsor
pnpm 10.21: Safer Installs and Smarter Runtime Management — Now installs the Node version required by a dependency, declared in its engines.runtime field, meaning CLI apps and postinstall scripts will run with the specified version. The trustPolicy setting also adds protection against supply-chain attacks by failing to install a package if its trust level drops.
Zoltan Kochan
Ink 6.5: Build Interactive CLI Apps using React — A very widely used terminal-based React renderer for building reactive terminal apps using components. v6.5 is notable for adding an incremental rendering option.
Vadim Demedes
vis-timeline 8.4 – Interactive control to visualize data across time, as shown above. Numerous examples here.
rasterizeHTML.js 1.4 – Renders HTML into a canvas element. Now supporting OffscreenCanvas too.
file-type 21.1 – Detect the file type of a file, stream, or data in both Node and the browser.
Svelte SEO 2.0 – Optimize your Svelte app for search engines and social media.
isomorphic-git 1.35 – Pure JS implementation of git for Node & browsers.
📰 Classifieds
Add lightning-fast, on-device 1D/2D code scanning to your web app with STRICH. Easy integration, simple pricing, free trial and demo!
Still writing tests manually?
See why modern engineering teams like Dropbox, Notion and Lattice rely on Meticulous to run E2E UI tests.
Launch Your Shopify Storefront in Minutes with Next.js – Open-source starter with Dynamic OG Images, AI Vector Search & Vercel Toolbar.
🎨 Try Pintura image editor for free today, add a polished cropping, rotating, and annotation experience to your web app in minutes.
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:
🔒 OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) has released its list of the top ten web application security threats in 2025.
🤖 An ardent critic of LLMs spent a month doing ‘chat oriented programming’ and while he found the experience “infuriating”, he concedes it has merit and is a viable option “if your tolerance for pain is high enough.”.
🧊 Ever fancied implementing a voxel-based engine for that Minecraft-esque experience? Uses (very Rust-y) pseudocode in order to remain timeless and let you enjoy doing the implementation yourself.
An explanation of the differences between monorepos, multi-repo, submodule and subtree setups in Git.
💻 If you like collecting stickers from conferences, you might enjoy this gallery of hundreds of people’s stickered-up laptops or even want to submit your own. It took me a while to find any JavaScript stickers, but they’re there..
🎂 P.S. JavaScript Weekly turned fifteen years old this week! Thanks to all of you for reading, and particularly anyone still subscribed from the first issue. We haven’t looked at the stats in a while, but we know there are some of you! 🙂
