New Jan 6, 2026

A new JavaScript engine from Fabrice Bellard

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#​767 — January 6, 2026

Read on the Web

🎉 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:

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.

  • Prisma 7.2, Deno 2.6.4

📖  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, as well as 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.

📰 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:

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