A new JavaScript engine from Fabrice Bellard
#767 — January 6, 2026
🎉 Happy New Year. JavaScript Weekly is now landing in your inboxes on Tuesdays, so here we are! Let’s see what 2026 brings.
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Your editor, Peter Cooper
JavaScript Weekly
The 2025 JavaScript Rising Stars — At the start of each year, Michael rounds up the projects in the JavaScript ecosystem that gained the most popularity on GitHub in the prior year. After a two year run of topping the chart, shadcn/ui has been pushed down to #3 by n8n and React Bits. This is a fantastic roundup, now in its tenth(!) year, and features commentary from a few industry experts too.
Michael Rambeau et al.
Make Flaky Tests a Last-Year Problem — Meticulous creates and maintains a continuously evolving E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Built on Chromium with a deterministic engine, it’s the only testing tool that eliminates flakes. Relied on by Dropbox, Notion, and Lattice.
Meticulous Ai sponsor
MicroQuickJS: A New JavaScript Engine from Fabrice Bellard — Fabrice, one of the world’s most prolific developers well-known for creating FFmpeg, QEMU and QuickJS, is back with a new JavaScript engine targeting embedded systems, and that can run with as little as 10KB of RAM.
Fabrice Bellard
💡 The discussion about MicroQuickJS on Hacker News was particularly rich. Redis’s creator, Salvatore Sanfilippo, even noted that Redis would have used JavaScript as its scripting language instead of Lua if this had existed in 2010.
IN BRIEF:
pnpm‘s lead maintainer, Zoltan Kochan, presents a look back at how 2025 was a transformative year for the project.
If you missed our final issue of 2025, be sure to check it out. We did a month-by-month rundown of what happened in the JavaScript world and shared the top ten links of the year.
WebF is a new WHATWG-compliant web runtime for Flutter so you can build parts of Flutter apps using a more typical JS stack (React, Vue, etc.)
RELEASES:
pnpm 10.27 – The alternative, efficient (and increasingly security-focused) package manager gets some tweaks, including a setting to ignore trust policy checks for packages published more than a specified time ago.
Ink 6.6 – Use React to build CLI apps, as used by Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and many others.
🎨 Color.js v0.6 – The popular standards-compliant color conversion and manipulation library approaches its eventual 1.0 release.
📖 Articles and Videos
How to Compile JavaScript to C with Static Hermes — The creator of Parcel is porting parts of the project to Rust, but this raises some challenges on interoperating with existing JavaScript plugins, especially without a runtime JS interpreter. What about compiling JavaScript to C libraries that can be called directly? It’s possible!
Devon Govett
🦖 Build a Dinosaur Runner Game with Deno — An ongoing series of posts (part two and three are also available) on the official Deno blog where you get to recreate something akin to Chrome’s Dinosaur Game for yourself.
Jo Franchetti
How CERN Cut Storage by 95% and 40x’d Query Speed with TimescaleDB — Learn how CERN engineers modernized Large Hadron Collider time-series data for performance, scale, and cost efficiency.
Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB) sponsor
Fixing TypeScript Performance Problems: A Case Study — A big monorepo-based TypeScript project was suffering sluggish IntelliSense, long type-checking times, and slow builds, but Solomon’s team found some ways to significantly improve things.
Solomon Hawk
Why Object of Arrays (SoA Pattern) Beat Interleaved Arrays — A dive down a JavaScript performance rabbit hole.
Royal Bhati
📄 Brendan Eich Warns Against “Rushed Web UX Over Native” as Windows 11 Leans Harder on WebView2 and Electron Windows Latest
📄 Implementing Streaming JSON in Just 200 Lines of JavaScript Krasimir Tsonev
📄 Signals vs Query-Based Compilers Marvin Hagemeister
📄 The Nine Levels of JavaScript Dependency Hell Andrew Nesbitt
📄 How to Create a Pixel-to-Voxel Video Drop Effect with Three.js and Rapier Junichi Kasahara
🛠 Code & Tools
Schedule-X 3.6: A Material Design Calendar and Date Picker — Available in the form of React/Preact, Vue, Svelte, Angular, or plain JS components. Open source but with a premium version with extra features. GitHub repo.
Tom Österlund
📄 jsPDF 4.0: Client-Side JavaScript PDF Generation — Create tickets, documents, certificates, etc. all on the fly. There’s a live demo in the thorough documentation.
Parallax
SurveyJS: JavaScript Libraries for Custom Web Forms — Keep full ownership of your data. Build JSON-driven forms in your app without SaaS limitations.
SurveyJS sponsor
Bruno 3.0: An Open-Source HTTP API Client App — There are a lot of ‘API client’ tools with varying levels of features, but this is open source and entirely built in JavaScript. v3.0 features a complete overhaul of the UI, adds workspaces for grouping things together, and more. GitHub repo.
Bruno Software Inc.
JoltPhysics.js 1.0 – A popular C++ physics library can now be used from JavaScript thanks to Emscripten. Check out numerous demos here.
🎶 ChordSheetJS 13.0 – Library for parsing and formatting chords and chord sheets. (Demo.)
Middy 7.0 – Node.js middleware engine for AWS Lambda. Now supports Durable Functions.
PlayCanvas glTF Viewer 5.8 – 3D model viewer supporting glTF 2.0 and PLY.
k6 1.5 – Modern Go + JavaScript-powered load testing tool. (Homepage.)
📊 Recharts 3.6 – Popular D3-powered React charting library.
NATS.js 3.3 – JavaScript client for the NATS messaging system.
📰 Classifieds
🔑 Let users create their own API keys with Clerk. Built-in UI components, scopes, expiration & revocation. Now in public beta.
Trigger.dev handles queues, retries, and long-running tasks so you can build production-ready agents and TypeScript workflows reliably at scale.
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:
For years, Mozilla, Apple, and the CSS Working Group have been working to bring “masonry” layouts (as above) natively to CSS. The concept is now called CSS Grid Lanes and here’s how it works. You can already try it out in Safari Technology Preview 234.
Addy Osmani shares 21 valuable lessons from spending 14 years at Google. Good general advice for remaining a competent and engaged engineer over time.
Andy Pavlo has put together a neat review of what happened in the world of databases in 2025. Simon Willison has a similar review of LLMs in 2025.
🤖 Mattias Geniar explains how AI has made web development fun again (for him, at least).
Ultimate Linux is a curious experiment to build a minimal userspace for Linux entirely in JavaScript.
