A 2024 JavaScript retrospective

#​717 — December 19, 2024

Read on the Web

🎄 We’ve made it to the end of 2024! In this issue, we’re being reflective, leading with a few news items but then looking at what made 2024 special in the world of JavaScript, and covering some of the biggest things we linked to this year.

Then we’re on a Christmas break for two weeks and will be back in your inbox on Friday, January 10, 2025, — yes, we’re moving back to Fridays for 2025! We hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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Peter Cooper and the Cooperpress team

JavaScript Weekly

The State of JavaScript 2024 Results — We recently encouraged you to take the annual State of JavaScript survey; the results are now out. 14,015 folks took part and we get to see what language features folks are using, experiences with popular libraries, build tool popularity, AI preferences, popular podcasts, runtime usage, and perhaps controversially, how more JavaScript developers are using TypeScript than not. There’s a lot to dig through here.

Sacha Greif

Complete Intro to React v9: New Project, Modern Stack — Join Brian Holt in building a pizza delivery app from scratch. Master hooks, TanStack Router, testing, and React 19 features in this comprehensive guide to modern React development. No prior React experience needed.

Frontend Masters sponsor

IN BRIEF:

• 🥇 JetBrains’ recent State of Developer Ecosystem report shows that JavaScript is “the most used programming language”, reports InfoWorld‘s Paul Krill. The report also claims “despite its gains, TypeScript will not replace JavaScript”.

• 🗓️ We’ve just finished 2024 wrap ups in the latest issue of Node Weekly and React Status, if you want more depth into those topics.

• 🤖 GitHub has made its Copilot AI assistant available for free (with limits). We also learn that there are now 150 million developers on GitHub.

• 🇵🇱 If you’re in Poland, consider heading along to the next WarsawJS meetup on January 8. Esteemed Polish computer scientist Andrzej Blikle will be speaking, amongst others.

• 🤖 Vercel is running a State of AI developer survey they’d like you to take.

RELEASES:

• JerryScript 3.0 – ‘Ultra lightweight’ JS engine for IoT/embedded use cases with full ES 5.1 compliance and 84% Test262 conformance.

• 🤖 Transformers.js v3.2 – Run machine learning models in the browser. Now supporting Moonshine real-time speech recognition and Phi 3.5 Vision.

• Bun 1.1.39 and 1.1.40 – The fast JS runtime gets a human-readble lockfile format, fetch bodies can now be streams, and Node compatibility improves.

• Prisma 6.1 – Popular ORM for Node.js and TypeScript. Tracing is now GA.

• pnpm 10.0 RC 0, ESLint v9.17.0, Recharts 2.15

Introducing Authentication Support for React Router — Add authentication and authorization to your React Router application in minutes with pre-built components and more.

Clerk sponsor

📄 Introducing TanStack Start – A new full-stack React framework powered by TanStack Router. Adam Rackis

📄 How to Create Multi-Step Forms with Vanilla JS and CSS Fatuma Abdullaho

📄 Summarizing Text with Transformers.js Raymond Camden

🗓️ What Happened to JavaScript in 2024

The JavaScript world has had a busy 2024, as you’d expect for the world’s most used programming language (despite the threat of being split into two). We looked back over the year and remembered some things that occurred:

• In February, the React team posted a mega ‘React Labs’ update which framed the whole of React’s year, explaining the goals of the React Compiler and the eventual React 19 release (which went stable this month).

• Alternative JavaScript runtimes had a great 2024, particularly Bun which introduced Bun Shell, Windows support and the ability to compile and run native C from JavaScript. Deno had a big year too, with the release of Deno 2 which included stronger Node.js/npm compatibility and package management tooling. Other systems continuing to progress this year include Boa JS, QuickJS, and Porffor.

• Over at TC39, lots of language proposals were advanced this year (and that’s just a sample – here’s some more!). The ES2025 future is bright.

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MongoDB sponsor

• Deno decided to take the JavaScript trademark fight to Oracle and formally filed a petition with the USPTO to cancel it. We hope to see some developments here in 2025, but Oracle are prepared to defend it.

• Not content to merely work on an edge platform, JS runtime, and fight Oracle, Deno also unveiled JSR, a fresh attempt at providing a registry for JavaScript packages.

• There were lots of big releases generally for major JavaScript projects including Svelte v5, Node.js v23.0, Astro 5.0, TypeScript 5.7, Vite 6.0, React Native 0.76, Next.js 15, React Router v7, Rspack 1.0, Vue.js 3.5, and Angular 19.

• The OG of JavaScript libraries jQuery 4.0 went into beta too! We keep our fingers crossed for a jQuery 4.0 final release in 2025.. 😉

🥇 Our Top Items of 2024

Next up is a walk through the top items we included in 2024, ordered by level of reader engagement. No editorial judgments here – these are the things you cared about most:

1. console.delight — By far our most popular link of the year with over 20,000 clicks(!) – but who doesn’t use and love console.log? This post showed us how in the browser console it’s not merely for printing plain text, but can be used to render things like SVGs and HTML.

Zach Saucier

2. JavaScript Visualized: Promise Execution — A well-diagrammed article coupled with an (optional) 8 minute video that went into how promises work under the hood. Hugely popular as most of Lydia’s content tends to be.

Lydia Hallie

WorkOS: Sell to Enterprises with a Few Lines of Code — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible, easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes instead of months.

WorkOS sponsor

3. Is htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework? — Despite being five years old, htmx has seen a surge in popularity in 2023 and 2024, partly due to framework fatigue, but also as its simple HTML-oriented approach to adding functionality to pages appeals to a diverse group of developers. v2.0 landed in June.

Alexander Petros

4. Ecma International Approves ECMAScript 2024: What’s New? — In June, the Ecma General Assembly approved the latest ECMAScript / JavaScript spec, officially making it a standard. As with ES2023, it was a reasonably small step forward, but Dr. Axel rounded up what was new.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

5. JavaScript’s ??= Operator: Default Values Made Simple — The ??= nullish coalescing assignment operator snuck into JavaScript a few years ago via ES2021 and has been broadly supported almost everywhere for ages. Trevor showed off how it can tighten up your assignments.

Trevor I. Lasn

6. Eloquent JavaScript: The Fourth Edition — Coming several years after the third edition, the latest version of what is, perhaps, the best ‘all rounder’ book for learning JavaScript arrived in March “adjusted to the realities of 2024 and generally touched up.”

Marijn Haverbeke

7. 33 JavaScript Concepts Every Developer Should Know — A curated collection of links to tutorials on 33 different areas it’s worth understanding well, including types, closures, equality, scope, and different engines.

Leonardo Maldonado

8. How Google Handles JavaScript In Its Indexing Process — At one point if you wanted Google to index your content it needed to be directly written in HTML and not dynamically rendered with JavaScript. Things have since changed, of course, but by how much?

Zecchini, Moore, Siddle, Ubl (Vercel)

🤗 Many thanks for reading JavaScript Weekly in 2024, sending in your links, and generally supporting us. We look forward to seeing you again early next year. Remember, we’re moving back to Fridays (long term subscribers may remember we used to go out on Fridays for the first several years) so we’ll be back on Friday, January 10.