A timeline of JavaScript’s history

#​737 — May 23, 2025

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A Brief History of JavaScript — JavaScript (originally named LiveScript) turns thirty years old this year and the Deno team has put together a fantastic timeline-based tour of how much things have progressed from its first appearance in Netscape Navigator, through offshoots like JScript, standardization, and the introduction of Node.js, all the way through to the modern day.

The Deno Team

2x-40x Faster Docker Builds with Blacksmith — With a one-line code change, Blacksmith can make your Docker builds incremental by mounting your Docker layer cache into your GitHub Actions runner. Blacksmith is used by 600+ companies like Ashby, Clerk, and Mintlify.

Blacksmith sponsor

⚡ Announcing TypeScript Native Previews — Earlier this year, Anders Hejlsberg teased a 10x faster TypeScript through efforts being made to port the TypeScript compiler to Go, enabling it to be compiled and run natively, as well as take advantage of more concurrency. The good news is you can now give it a.. go for yourself.

Microsoft

▶  An Introduction to JavaScript Frameworks — The creator of SolidJS has put together a tight 11-minute video boiling down the different approaches taken by React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and Solid. Dense, but a great way to get a lay of the land.

Ryan Carniato

IN BRIEF:

• Ryan Dahl responds to recent community chatter about the state of the Deno project in ‘Reports of Deno’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated’.

• Guess the Output is a fun multi-choice JavaScript quiz to put your knowledge to the test. Each answer is explained as you go.

• A look at the agenda for next week’s TC39 meeting, including the proposals up for discussion.

• React Router now has preview support for React Server Components.

RELEASES:

• Node.js v24.1.0 (Current) and v22.16.0 (LTS)

• Bun v1.2.14 – The fast JS runtime & toolkit.

• Slonik v48 – Node.js Postgres client with runtime & build time type safety.

• Zod v4, Astro 5.8, ESLint v9.27.0

📖  Articles

▶  What’s New in Angular — Two members of the Angular team presented a session at this week’s Google I/O event on the latest updates to the Angular framework in anticipation of the eventual release of Angular 20 next Thursday.

Chasanoff and Thompson (Google)

ESLint v9.0: A Retrospective — It’s been a year since ESLint v9.0 landed as the first major release in a few years. It enabled the new flat-config system by default and the rollout didn’t go as smoothly as hoped. This retrospective breaks down the full story and shares the lessons learned.

Nicholas C. Zakas

Getting Started with Clerk Billing — Learn how to build a complete billing experience with Clerk and Stripe, no custom UI or webhooks required.

Clerk sponsor

Six Ways Slack, Notion, and VS Code Improved Electron App Performance — An experienced Electron app developer shares a guide to Electron performance optimization and how to get the most out of your apps.

Amila Welihinda

📄 How the at() Method Makes Array Indexing Easier Matt Smith

📄 Styling Console Text in Node.js Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

📄 Authenticating JavaScript WebSockets Steven Waterman

🛠 Code & Tools

Defuddle: Extract the Main Content from Web Pages — Strips extraneous clutter from HTML in order to leave only the primary content for you to format or use as you wish. Essentially a modern implementation of the ideas behind Mozilla’s Readability. There’s an online demo if you want to give it a try.

Steph Ango

snapDOM: Captures DOM Nodes as Images — A fast and accurate DOM-to-image capture mechanism to capture any HTML element as a scalable SVG image, preserving styles, fonts, background images, etc.

ZumerLab

AI-Powered Code Reviews for JavaScript Teams — CodeRabbit helps you ship cleaner JavaScript by reviewing every PR with AI that understands your codebase.

CodeRabbit sponsor

ForesightJS: Predictive Mouse Intent Library — An interesting concept, with the entire page acting as a demo of sorts. The idea is to decrease latency by prefetching data or pages as soon as you think a user might be heading in that direction. Your mileage may vary and it’s less useful for touch devices.

ForesightJS, Inc.

Astra: A New JavaScript-to-EXE Compiler for Windows — Boasts “a new approach to compiling” JavaScript applications for a single executable experience on Windows only (for now).

QwertyCodeQC

Crosspost: A JS Utility for Posting Across Multiple Social Networks — Currently supports eight different services including Bluesky, X, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

Nicholas C. Zakas

Rockpack 6.0: An Alternative React App Starter — A tool aiming to get React project setup time as low as possible, complete with server side rendering support, bundling, linting and testing. v6.0 updates everything for React 19. GitHub repo.

Alex Sergey

• 🗓️ Calendar Link 2.10.0 – Generate event links for popular calendar services.

• octokit.js 5.0 – ‘All-batteries-included’ GitHub SDK for JavaScript.

• image-type 6.0 – Detect the image type of a Buffer/Uint8Array.

• Peggy 5.0 – Parser generator for JavaScript.

👀  Elsewhere..

Here’s a selection of things from the broader ecosystem this week:

• Google’s I/O event took place this week and ▶️ its ‘developer keynote’ was a highlight, particularly when Addy Osmani showed off some of the latest Chrome DevTools fun (starting at about 30 minutes in).

• Microsoft has unveiled a new Postgres extension for VS Code that brings IntelliSense completion to SQL, GitHub Copilot integration, a visual way to explore your schemas, and more.

• 🤖 Anthropic has unveiled its new Claude 4 models. The Claude family of LLMs are quite heavily used by modern coding agents, as well as Claude’s own now-generally-available Claude Code tool.

• The Glitch platform, a popular way to build and host Node-backed webapps, is shutting down its app hosting functionality – it seems uncertain quite what Glitch will or won’t be after July.