🎉  V8 is Faster and Safer Than Ever — The V8 team wants to end the year on a high and they’ve certainly pulled it off performance-wise. This post covers the highlights for the V8 engine in 2023, including the new Maglev mid-tier JIT compiler, the faster HTML parser, and support for several new JS features.

Victor Gomes (V8)

Announcing SvelteKit 2 — SvelteKit's first official release was a year ago, and despite its relative youth, the framework has been quickly embraced by the community. This 2.0 release is an incremental one, adding support for Vite 5, and laying the groundwork for Svelte 5 which is due for release in 2024.

Svelte

Feel the Power of More Than 420,000 Teammates and Work #LikeABosch — At Bosch, we shape the future with high-quality technologies and services to inspire people and improve their lives. And it’s our people who make us remarkable. Our success is your success. Let’s celebrate together. Learn more.

Bosch sponsor

date-fns v3 Released — The hugely popular suite of 200+ functions for working with dates in JavaScript has been rewritten in TypeScript, reintroduces String date arguments, has ESM support on Node, and all functions now export via named exports. GitHub repo.

Sasha Koss

v0: Vercel's AI-Powered React Component Creator — The AI-powered v0 looked fascinating on its release, but has been stuck behind a waitlist till now. Vercel has dropped that list, opening it to all users. Even Larry David would admit it's pretty, pretty good.

Vercel Labs

Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, The Modern Way — I'm as surprised as you, but this was the top-clicked link in 2023. If you’ve been leaning on something like Lodash for deep cloning, we “finally now have the built-in structuredClone function to make deep cloning objects in JavaScript a breeze.”

Steve Sewell

Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework — Web Components have been having 'quite a moment' this year and this looks set to continue in 2024. This was a spicy opinion piece but the points raised provoked a lot of discussion and remain highly relevant in the JS zeitgeist.

Jake Lazaroff

You’ve Got Options for Removing Event Listeners — A review of some of the most common approaches available to remove event listeners in JavaScript.

Alex MacArthur

Things You Forgot (or Never Knew) Because of React — The item that was popular in both this newsletter and our React newsletter and easily one of the 'classics' of the year.

Josh Collinsworth

Writing JavaScript Without a Build System — Using a variety of build tools for things like bundling and transpiling is reasonably standard in modern JavaScript development, but what if you want to keep things simple? For simple things, it’s not necessary, says Julia. This led to a lot of discussion on Hacker News.

Julia Evans

UnsuckJS: Comparing Lightweight JavaScript Options — A list of frontend JS libraries in a table on a single, fast page. It remains a handy way to see the relative popularity, file size, and latest versions of libraries as diverse as Preact, Bau, htmx, Hyperapp, and Mithril.

Adam Hill

React Libraries for 2023 — The React ecosystem is so large that there's often a problem of being spoiled for choice, so opinionated guides to different solutions tend to do well, like this annual list from Robin.

Robin Wieruch

A Huge Year for Playwright — The popular Web testing and automation framework took some serious steps forward in 2023, particularly with v1.32.0 (linked above) offering a ‘UI mode’ that lets you explore, run and debug tests in a UI environment, complete with built-in watch mode. ▶️ This video provides a good introduction.

Microsoft

You Don't (May Not) Need Lodash or Underscore — Inspired by the popular You Might Not Need jQuery, this extensive document provides pure JS alternatives to almost 100 different functions as you’d find in popular utility libraries like Lodash.

You Don't Need

Driver.js: Tours, Highlights, Contextual Help, and More — A no-dependency library for putting together on-page tours and contextual help. The project is a few years old but was rewritten in TypeScript in 2023, gained numerous enhancements, and got a fresh lick of paint.

Kamran Ahmed

Transformers.js: Running ML Models in Your Browser — Transformers are a type of machine learning model often used in language or visual processing and while running these in the browser remains in its infancy, Transformers.js opens up some ML models to you with some impressive demos here.

Xenova

DeviceScript: Microsoft's Even-Tinier TypeScript — DeviceScript brings the TypeScript experience to low-resource microcontroller devices. It’s compiled to a custom VM bytecode that can run in such constrained environments (a la Go’s TinyGo.) It’s aimed at VS Code users but there’s a CLI option.

Microsoft