The latest on Oracle’s hold on JavaScript

#​750 — August 29, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

An Illustrated Guide to Big O and Time Complexity — A fantastic JavaScript-oriented, interactive, visual essay about Big O notation and its role in describing algorithmic complexity. This is a beautiful bit of work, even if you’re already wise to O(log n) and O(n^2).

Sam Rose

💡 Sam is making a name for himself with his interactive essays – check out the load balancing, memory allocation, hashing, and bloom filter ones too.

JavaScript’s Trademark Problem — Dr. Axel discusses Oracle’s hold over the ‘JavaScript’ trademark, including the history and present-day legal attempts to challenge Oracle. Fireship has also just published ▶️ a video about the battle and there’s now a GoFundMe to raise funds to continue the fight.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer et al.

Tests Are Dead. Meticulous AI Is Here — 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 Wiz.

Meticulous AI sponsor

New in ESLint v9.34.0: Multithread Linting — A common feature of tools like Rslint, Biome, and Oxlint, is being ‘Nx times faster’ than ESLint, but the latest ESLint has a trick up its sleeve and can now process multiple files at the same time, dramatically reducing lint times for large projects.

Francesco Trotta

IN BRIEF:

• Daniel Rosenwasser proposes that TypeScript 6.0 should have --strict on by default. You can learn more about what’s planned for TypeScript 6.0 here.

• Malicious versions of Nx, along with some supporting plugin packages, were published to npm – more details on affected versions.

• Remix v3 is set to drop React, instead using its own fork of Preact.

• Codecs are a new Zod API for defining bidirectional transformations between two types.

• 🇺🇸 CascadiaJS is a conference taking place September 18-19 in Seattle, WA.

RELEASES:

• Rspack 1.5 – The fast web bundler improves barrel file optimization, has a faster file system watcher, improved browser support, and more. It’s a big release.

• Node.js v24.7.0 (Current) – A step forward for cryptography, both with Web Cryptography API support and post-quantum standards.

• Electron 37.4, Prisma 6.15.0, Ink 6.2.3

📖  Articles and Videos

Speeding Up the JavaScript Ecosystem: Semver — The latest in Marvin’s multi-year series of posts on optimizing heavily used parts of the JavaScript ecosystem: “During the installation process, package managers run a bunch of semver comparisons. The semver library used in npm, yarn and pnpm can be made around 33x faster.”

Marvin Hagemeister

Say Bye with JavaScript Beacon — The Beacon API has been supported in all mainstream browsers for years now and provides a way to send a guaranteed (even if a page is being unloaded) non-blocking request to a web server when no response is needed.

HemathKumar R

Secure Your AI Agents So That You Can Protect Your Users — Whether you have a B2B or B2C use case, Auth0 is a full IdP that provides robust security like MFA and continuous threat monitoring.

Auth0 sponsor

How We Migrated Our Monorepo to Node Type Stripping — Since v23.6 (and in LTS since v22.18.0), Node has supported running (most) TypeScript code by stripping the types out first. One team shares the challenges encountered and what the end benefits were.

Stuart Dotson (Calm)

You No Longer Need JavaScript (For Many Frontend Things) — A neat look at some of what plain HTML and CSS can achieve in terms of effects and techniques for which you might have once relied upon JavaScript.

Lyra

📄 Understanding Promise.any(): When One Success is Enough – Given multiple promises, resolve as soon as just one fulfills. Matt Smith

📄 The Struggle of Wrapping a JavaScript Game for Desktop – The author explains why they finally settled on NW.js. JSLegendDev

📄 Speeding Up Firefox Local AI Runtime – How Firefox accelerated inference by replacing the WASM-based ONNX runtime that powers Transformers.js with a native C++ counterpart. Ziadé, Adenot, and Guelton

📄 Unit Formatting with Intl in JavaScript Raymond Camden

📄 Exporting a Cloth Simulation from Blender to an Interactive Three.js Scene Joshua Guo

📺 Coming in Angular 21: HttpClient Built In by Default Igor Sedov

🛠 Code & Tools

Cornerstone3D 4.0: Build Web-Based Medical Imaging Apps — A set of JavaScript libraries to build things like this 3D CT scan viewer, PET-CT scan viewer, and much more besides. There’s a lot to this project, along with numerous tutorials.

Open Health Imaging Foundation

ImageJS 1.0: Image Processing and Manipulation Library — A library for resizing, cropping, filtering, color adjustments, and numerous other image transformations which works in Node.js and the browser (supporting JPEG, PNG, BMP and TIFF – thanks to pure JS dependencies like fast-jpeg and fast-png). v1.0 brings TypeScript support and a more intuitive API. GitHub repo.

ImageJS Team

The Best Way for Web Developers To Track Key User Flows — Check out User Journeys, a new approach to connecting technical performance to user engagement in your web apps.

Embrace sponsor

Obs.js: Context-Aware Web Performance for Everyone — Uses the Navigator and Battery APIs to get contextual information about your users’ connection strength and battery status so you can adapt your site/app to the environment or collect the data for analysis.

Harry Roberts

📊 SveltePlot: A Visualization Framework for Svelte — It’s still in alpha but its API is inspired by a similar plotting library by Observable and built on top of D3. There are plenty of examples in the docs.

Gregor Aisch

• Repomix 1.4 – Pack an entire repository into a single, LLM-friendly file. v1.4 adds the ability to integrate commit history.

• MikroORM 6.5 – TypeScript ORM for Node based on Data Mapper, Unit of Work and Identity Map patterns.

• 📄 jsPDF 3.0.2 – Client-side JavaScript PDF generation for everyone.

• Faker 10.0 – Generate fabricated data to your heart’s content.

• Tiptap 3.3 – Headless, framework-agnostic rich text editor.

• RxDB 16.18 – Offline-first, reactive database for JS apps.

• Denops.vim 8.0 – Write Vim/Neovim plugins with Deno.

🎁 Some Bonus Items

• Intl Playground is a handy site to get a quick look at how the different options on Intl.DateTimeFormat present in real life.

• 📺 The folks who created the epic, well-produced ▶️ Vue.js documentary, ▶️ React documentary and ▶️ Node.js documentary are back with ▶️ a movie-length documentary all about Python.

• Talking of Python, Pyodide is a port of CPython to WebAssembly that can be used both in the browser and from Node.js.

• 🕹️ Jeff Schomay is creating a JavaScript roguelike game called Thunder Lizard and decided to see what would happen if he used AI to turn his ASCII renders into full graphics live and on-the-fly. Fun, but sounds expensive!

• GitHub has added WebP image support across its site. It was a little flaky till now.

• 🎵 Need some music for programming? A fantastic design for a text-only site.