Babel 8 RC Arrives, Gatsby Lives, Lodash Resets
#771 — February 3, 2026
JavaScript Weekly
Four Heavyweights Drop Updates
Four stalwarts of the JavaScript ecosystem all shipped notable releases this week, and odds are you’re using at least one of them:
Gatsby v5.16 proves Gatsby, once considered neck-and-neck with Next.js in the React world, is not ‘dead’. The headline feature is React 19 support.
Babel 7 just shipped its final release. “After years in the making, Babel 8 is finally ready,” in release candidate form, at least.
Rspress 2.0 is a major release for the high-performance Rust-powered, but JavaScript-facing, static site generator.
Lodash 4.17.23 sounds minor, but it’s a ‘security reset’ for the still heavily used utility library and designed to provide a base for a longer future.
Only Fools Write Tests — Modern engineering teams like Notion, Dropbox, Wiz, and LaunchDarkly use Meticulous to maintain E2E UI tests that cover every edge case of your web app.
Meticulous sponsor
🦀 OpenClaw: The Runaway AI Assistant — An intense week for a new open source TypeScript project: 150k stars on GitHub, hordes buying Mac Minis to run it, two rebrands (it was originally Clawdbot), and an ecosystem of projects the agents use autonomously (e.g. an entire social network). Another example of TypeScript at the heart of the AI boom.
Peter Steinberger
IN BRIEF:
The popular JSBin collaborative JavaScript pastebin went down for a few days and Remy Sharp shares the war story of what happened.
🔒 The OpenJS Foundation has shared an annual report covering its efforts in securing the JS ecosystem.
Angular is changing components’ default change detection strategy.
Both Astro and Svelte have shared monthly roundups of what’s new.
RELEASES:
Node.js v25.6.0 (Current) – async_hooks can now skip Promise hooks to reduce overhead. Plus, URL parsing now supports Unicode 17.
jQuery UI 1.14.2 – The legacy UI library gets its first update in over a year and now works with jQuery 4.0.
Bun v1.3.8 – Say hello to native Markdown parsing.
Astro 5.17, ESLint 10.0.0-rc2, tRPC v11.9.0, Lexical 0.40.0, Reka UI 2.8 (formerly Radix Vue)
📖 Articles and Videos
⁉️ How Not to Parse Numbers in JavaScript — Why use a proper locale-aware API to parse numbers when you can hand-roll a maze of string splits, separator swaps, and implicit type coercions that silently break on edge cases?
Remy Porter (The Daily WTF)
📉 Node.js 16 to 25 Benchmarked Version-by-Version — The jumps in performance in various areas are striking (with Node 25, especially), with other areas getting more modest gains.
RepoFlow
A Practical Checklist for B2B Enterprise Readiness — Measure gaps in auth, admin UX, security, monitoring, and architecture for landing enterprise customers. Download today!
Descope sponsor
Explicit Resource Management in JavaScript — You can use using for deterministic cleanup, calling Symbol.dispose/asyncDispose at scope exit without try/finally. A small fix for leaks and forgotten teardowns in streams, observers, locks, and similar APIs.
Matt Smith
The History of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg — GitHub interviewed the creator of both C# and TypeScript about his career, why TypeScript was created in the first place, some internal Microsoft politics, as well as the ongoing Go port of the TypeScript compiler. There’s a video of the full interview, as well as ‘seven learnings’ boiled down in written form.
GitHub
📄 My Opinionated ESLint Setup for Vue Projects – Packed with examples to pick and choose from. Alexander Opalic
📄 A Scroll-Revealed WebGL Gallery with GSAP, Three.js, Astro and Barba.js – Striking visual image reveal effect with a live demo. Chakib Mazouni
📄 Predicting Math.random() in Firefox Using Z3 SMT-Solver Dennis Yurichev
🎤 Securing npm is Table Stakes Nicholas C. Zakas (Changelog Podcast)
📄 Building a Simple RSS Aggregator with Astro Raymond Camden
🛠 Code & Tools
Heat.js 5.0: A Flexible Heat Map Rendering Solution — Generate customized interactive heatmaps (think GitHub contributions graph), or render heatmaps as lines and bar charts. The site is packed with demos to enjoy. GitHub repo.
William Troup
Building an MCP Server? Don’t Roll Your Own Auth — WorkOS AuthKit handles OAuth 2.1 flows so your MCP server just verifies tokens. Control which tools AI agents access.
WorkOS sponsor
🕒 Croner 10.0: Cron-Style Triggers and Evaluation — Trigger functions on any cron schedule using cron syntax. It can also evaluate cron expressions to give you a list of upcoming times. v10.0 brings full OCPS (Open Cron Pattern Specification) 1.4 compliance and even more scheduling options.
Hexagon
🗓️ DayFlow: A Full Calendar Component for React — A React-only feature-rich calendar component with drag-and-drop, multiple views, and all the usual GCal-style richness. Its infinite scrolling feature is nifty. GitHub repo.
DayFlow Contributors
Tsonic: A TypeScript to C# Transpiler — The idea is for creating native executables that run on .NET. I’ve not tested it as I’m not in that ecosystem but it’s an interesting idea.
Jeswin
📄 EmbedPDF 2.4 – Framework-agnostic JavaScript PDF viewer. (Demo.)
JavaScriptKit v0.40 – Swift framework for interacting with JS via WASM.
StackBlur.js 3.0 – Long-standing Gaussian blur library; now using ESM.
Knip 5.83 – Finds and fixes unused files, dependencies and exports.
📄 jsPDF 4.1 – Generate PDFs directly in JavaScript. (Demo.)
qrcode.vue 3.8 – Vue.js component to generate QR codes.
focus-trap 8.0 – Trap focus within a DOM node. (Demo.)
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:
GitHub is exploring solutions to tackle low-quality contributions, which could include giving you the option to disable PRs entirely or at least restrict them to collaborators. Got opinions? Join the discussion.
How to throttle individual network requests in Chrome, rather than at a global level. Ideal for testing what happens when your dependencies load very slooooooowwwwwly….
🤖 OpenAI has released a desktop version of its agentic-coding Codex app. macOS only for now, though someone used Codex to port itself to Linux.. 😂
⚠️ If you’re a Windows user using the popular Notepad++ editor, you might want to double check your install as the project suffered a suspected state-sponsored hijack in 2025.
svelteesp32 is a curious project for embedding Svelte, React, Angular or Vue frontends into ESP32 microcontroller apps.
