What’s actually new in JavaScript (and what’s coming next)

Plus pnpm 11, Rspack 2.0, TypeScript 7 Beta, and a new take on JSX.

#​783 — April 28, 2026 Read on the Web Together with  JavaScript Weekly pnpm 11.0 Released — You’ve heard about its benefits, but now the popular package management tool is even better. v11 sets minimumReleaseAge to one day by default, there's an SQLite-backed store index (faster installs!), native package publishing, pack-app, and more. There's a migration guide for v10 users. Work has also resumed on a Rust-powered port called Pacquet. Zoltan Kochan 💡 On the topic of package managers, Aube is a new contender from the creator of Mise that focuses heavily on performance. Still Writing Tests Manually? Meticulous AI Is Here — Notion, Dropbox, Wiz and LaunchDarkly now use a testing paradigm they can’t work without. Built by former Palantir engineers, Meticulous automatically creates an evolving suite of E2E UI tests, delivering exhaustive coverage with no developer effort. Meticulous sponsor TypeScript 7.0 Beta: 10x Faster TypeScript Compilation — The Go-powered port with “about 10 times faster” compiler performance. TypeScript 6.0's deprecations and config changes will help you upgrade smoothly from v5 to v7. There are also changes to how to write your code to review. While v7 is considered "close to production-ready", a stable programmatic API won't arrive till v7.1. Microsoft IN BRIEF: Node.js v26.0 (Current) is expected later today, enabling Temporal API support by default after an upgrade to V8 14.6. Here's a preview of the release notes. Noticed GitHub being flakier than usual lately? Vlad Fedorov has a fresh official update on GitHub's reliability (including last week's merge queue incident). 🇪🇺 NodeConf EU is back. It's in Bologna, Italy this September 29-30. Tickets are on sale, and here's the CFP if you want to speak. RELEASES: Rspack 2.0 – The fast, Rust-based webpack-compatible bundler is 10% faster than v1.7, performs better static analysis, and adds experimental RSC support. Rsbuild 2.0 was released too. Nuxt UI 4.7 – Vue UI library with 125+ components. v4.7 adds Listbox, and a Prompt component for displaying copy/pasteable AI prompts. 🌐 Lingui 6.0 – Popular framework and runtime agnostic JS i18n and l10n library. Transformers.js 4.2.0, Electron 41.3.0, Etherpad v2.7.0 📖  Articles and Videos What’s Actually New in JavaScript (And What’s Coming Next) — You could read the specs and countless posts about each new language feature or... this post that brings everything relevant and useful from ES2025 and ES2026 into one place. Iterator helpers, Promise.try, Map.getOrInsert, using, Temporal, and much more, are covered. Neciu Dan Stop Guessing Where Your Next.js App Broke [Workshop] — Learn to trace Next.js errors back to their source using logs and tracing. Free workshop, register today Sentry sponsor 📄 Debugging WASM in Chrome DevTools – Tips on using the Chrome DevTools’ “very capable WASM debugger”. Eli Bendersky 📄 Writing Node.js Addons with .NET Native AOT – You can now write native Node addons in .NET-based languages, such as C#. Drew Noakes (Microsoft) 📄 The Simplest C Function-to-WebAssembly-to-JS Pipeline Peter Cooper 📄 Upgrade Cypress to TypeScript 6.0 Gleb Bahmutov 🛠 Code & Tools TSRX: A TypeScript Language Extension for Declarative UIs — A fresh attempt at improving upon JSX from a Svelte maintainer and former React core engineer. It includes control flow, scoped styles, and locals, and compiles to React, Preact, Solid and Ripple. Dominic Gannaway 📊 Lightweight Charts™ 5.2: Fast Charts for Financial Data — A seven-year-old canvas-based charting library optimized for financial data use cases like rounded candle plots, box whisker plots, and dual range histograms. The homepage is full of interactive demos. GitHub repo. TradingView Clerk CLI: Manage Auth from Your Terminal — Detects your framework, scaffolds auth, and manages sign-in methods and session policies in code. Open source. Clerk sponsor Nano Stores 1.3: A Tiny (286 Bytes) State Manager — Atomic and derived stores for every major framework (including React) and vanilla JS. Worth a look if a tiny footprint and framework-agnostic design appeal to you. Andrey Sitnik (Evil Martians) BWIP-JS 4.10: Barcode Writer in Pure JavaScript — A library to generate barcodes using over 100 different standards. There’s a live demo where you'll discover far more types of barcodes exist than you imagined. Mark Warren 🍋 Fresh 2.3: Zero JS by Default, View Transitions, and More — Deno full-stack web framework (explained here) gains first-class WebSocket support, no longer ships any JavaScript for pages that don’t need it, and makes using the View Transitions API a snap with a single attribute in your views. Bartek Iwańczuk (Deno) 🎬 Mediabunny v1.41.0 – Powerful JavaScript toolkit for working with media files. hyperid 4.0 – Matteo Collina's fast unique ID generator for Node & browsers. Svelte Bricks 0.5 – Svelte masonry component with SSR support. focus-trap 8.1 – Trap focus within a DOM node. (Demo.) CheerpJ 4.3 – Run unmodified Java apps in the browser. qrcode.vue 3.9 – Vue component to generate QR codes. 📰 Classifieds 📸 Scan barcodes, QR codes and others directly in the browser using STRICH, a lean JS library. Free 30-day trial, try the demo app today! ⌘ Command Code is a frontier coding agent that ships features, fixes bugs, writes tests, & continuously learns your taste. Start now for $1. 📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem 🎵 I've been dying to link to Chip Player JS again for a while now. It's a JavaScript powered online player and repository of over 300,000 MIDI, tracker, chiptune, and video game music files. It's fantastic for background music, and if you can remember a game, it's probably in here. Chrono Trigger's soundtrack is a particular favorite of mine. 📊 Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts with no JavaScript or images needed. For example: {l:10,50,30,80,20} gets rendered as an inline sparkline. 🤖 Cloudflare's new Is Your Site Agent-Ready? tool analyzes your site to "see how ready it is for AI agents." 🤖 Cloudflare has released a set of agent skills to help agentic development tools build on the Cloudflare platform. Sean Goedecke explains how good engineers write bad code at big companies. If all else fails, just stare at the wall for ten minutes.

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