What’s next for JavaScript frameworks in 2026
#770 — January 27, 2026
JavaScript Weekly
Introducing LibPDF: PDF Parsing and Generation from TypeScript — LibPDF bills itself as ‘the PDF library TypeScript deserves’ and supports parsing, modifying, signing and generating PDFs with a modern API in Node, Bun, and the browser. GitHub repo.
Documenso
JavaScript Frameworks – Heading into 2026 — The creator of SolidJS knows more than a thing or two about JS frameworks and has written an annual review of the scene for the past few years. Here, he picks on four areas of evolution, and says it’s “an incredibly exciting time to be working on JavaScript frameworks.”
Ryan Carniato
Still Writing Tests Manually? — Notion, Dropbox, Wiz, and LaunchDarkly have found a new testing paradigm – and they can’t imagine working without it. Built by ex-Palantir engineers, Meticulous autonomously creates a continuously evolving suite of E2E UI tests that delivers near-exhaustive coverage with zero developer effort.
Meticulous AI sponsor
IN BRIEF:
Lea Verou has celebrated getting two ECMAScript proposals she’s championed to stage 1 at TC39 this week: Composable Accessors and Alias Accessors. Rob Palmer also shares more proposal updates from the latest TC39 plenary.
🕹️ The creator of Three.js (known as mrdoob) has created a Three.js-powered port of 1996’s Quake – here’s the source. You can learn more about this project in this X thread.
📊 JSBenchmarks.com is a fresh attempt to benchmark several popular JavaScript frameworks. As always with benchmarks, use a critical eye, but the example apps are open to read or contribute to.
RELEASES:
Node.js 25.5.0 (Current) – Introduces a –build-sea option that simplifies the process of building single executable applications.
Bun v1.3.7 – The popular runtime updates its JavaScriptCore engine, leading to 35% faster async/await and ARM64 perf improvements. It also lands a new option to generate profiling data in Markdown format for easier sharing, plus native JSON5 and JSONL parsing support.
Rolldown 1.0 RC – Fast Rust-based bundler with a Rollup-compatible API and esbuild feature parity.
npm v11.8.0, Emscripten 5.0, Neutralinojs 6.5.0
📖 Articles and Videos
Porting 100k Lines from TypeScript to Rust in a Month — A prolific JavaScript developer ported a Pokémon battle simulator to Rust and shares his experiences and techniques used to work around issues where Claude Code would get bogged down in such a large task. He notes “LLM-based coding agents are such a great new tool” but require “engineering expertise and constant babysitting”.
Christopher Chedeau
Building a JavaScript Runtime in One Month — “What if I could build a JavaScript engine small enough to embed in a C program, but complete enough to actually run real code?” The end result is Ant.
theMackabu
Clerk MCP Server for AI Coding Assistants — Connect Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to Clerk’s docs. Get working auth code instead of outdated patterns.
Clerk sponsor
Inside Turbopack: Building Faster by Building Less — If you’re working on a large codebase, faster hot reloading, better scaling, and persistent caching are all quite desirable. Here’s how these things came about in Turbopack.
Shew, Woodruff and Koppers (Vercel)
▶ Bun Explained in 100 Seconds — The popular quick dev explainer channel tackles Bun at a high level.
Fireship
📄 Fixing a 6-Year-Old JavaScript Memory Leak in a Google Cloud Function Matt Zeunert (DebugBear)
📄 Build a Dinosaur Runner Game with Deno, Part 4 – The fourth part of an ongoing series on the official Deno blog. Jo Franchetti
📄 Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare: Serverless Cold Starts Compared Punit Sethi
📄 SPAs are a Performance Dead End Yegor Bugayenko
🛠 Code & Tools
Midscene.js: Remote Control for the Web, Mobile and Desktop Using Vision Models — Provides a way to drive numerous platforms from JavaScript (including iOS) by using various integrations and a vision-capable model so you can write actions in a mixture of JavaScript and natural language and have them performed.
ByteDance Inc.
🔄 Travels 1.0: A Fast, Framework-Agnostic Undo/Redo Library — Allows you to add undo/redo functionality to apps like text editors, drawing tools, or other interactive software. Uses a memory efficient technique only storing changes, rather than full snapshots for each change.
Mutative
The #1 Time-Series Database Built on Postgres — TimescaleDB extends Postgres with hypertables, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates. Start building for free.
Tiger Data sponsor
SonicJS 2.7: Perf-Focused Edge-Native Headless CMS for Cloudflare Workers — A production-ready CMS built specifically for the edge. GitHub repo.
SonicJS Team
🤖 Mastra 1.0: An AI Framework from the Former Gatsby Team — An all-in-one framework (homepage) for building AI-powered apps and agents.
Sam Bhagwat
Storybook 10.2 – The frontend workshop for building UI components gets some UI and story authoring improvements.
🎥 Mediabunny 1.31.0 – Media toolkit for reading, writing, and converting video and audio files, directly in the browser.
Cheerio v1.2 – Fast, flexible HTML and XML parser and DOM manipulation library.
eslint-plugin-regexp 3.0 – Plugin for finding regex mistakes and style violations.
React Timeline Editor 1.0 – Component to build timeline-based editors. (Examples.)
📊 Billboard.js 3.18.0 – Flexible JavaScript chart library based on D3.js.
Feedsmith 2.9 – Feed parser and generator for popular feed formats.
Typed.js v3.0 – Typing animation library. (GPL licensed.)
Regle v1.17 – Headless form validation library for Vue.
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📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:
OpenAI’s Michael Bolin wrote a thorough technical review of how its OpenAI Codex agent works. Invaluable reading for anyone trying to implement their own coding agent or even if you just want to know how they do their thing.
🕹️ A group of developers has ported Super Monkey Ball to the Web. Here’s the source if you’re intrigued – it has surprisingly few dependencies.
Mystral Native.js is an early-stage experimental runtime for running JavaScript games natively using WebGPU: “Think of it as ‘Electron for games’ but without Chromium.”
Miss using telnet to connect to remote services? There are still some text-based services you can access.
