What's new in ECMAScript 2026 (and usable today)

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💡 Vite+ was originally intended to be a commercial project to fund work on Vite and related projects, but was open sourced under the MIT license earlier this year.

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What's New in ECMAScript 2026 — The 876 page ECMAScript 2026 spec was approved last week, and this round-up covers several main new features that made the cut, from Array.fromAsync to native Uint8Array Base64/Hex conversion, with examples for each. All are already in browsers and runtimes (except Math.sumPrecise in Node) so you can likely use them today.

Pawel Grzybek

IN BRIEF:

• 🕹️ js1024, the annual 1KB code-golf competition, is open for entries. The theme is 'dreaming', and you've got 1,024 bytes to make something neat. Here's last year's winner to get a feel for the caliber.

• There's a TC39 proposal to standardize a code property on Error (long a de-facto Node convention). Its champion, James Snell, hopes to advance it at this month's plenary.

RELEASES:

• vinext 1.0 Beta – Cloudflare's Vite plugin reimplementing Next.js's API surface.

• webpack-dev-server 6.0 – The official webpack dev server with live reloading upgrades to Express 5 and native ESM.

• Dependency Cruiser 18.0 – Tool to validate and graph project dependencies.

• npm 11.18.0, pnpm 11.10

Working with AI: A Concrete Example — The creator of htmx reflects on the role of AI in his work with a practical example of using Claude to investigate a bug report. He also touches on how AI fits in with being an ‘older developer’, a topic I rarely see brought up.

Carson Gross

📄 A Guide to Hydration and Rendering Strategies – SSR, streaming, islands, resumability, and RSC, compared. Neciu Dan

📄 WebGL Without a GPU – Useful tips for testing or taking screenshots of WebGL-rendered experiences. Kiko Beats

📄 Understanding TypeScript's Distributive Conditional Types Tejas Bubane

📄 Things You No Longer Need JavaScript For – A catalog of patterns modern HTML and CSS can now handle alone. Aaron T. Grogg

• ESLint Plugin Perfectionist 5.10 – For when you're really particular about how things like objects, imports, and types are ordered, whether alphabetically, by length, etc.

• TinyBase 9.0 – Bug fix and stability release for the reactive data store and sync engine backend.

• wavesurfer.js 7.12.10 – Interactive waveform rendering for playing audio.

• React Google Maps 1.9 – Use a Google map as a reactive component.

📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem

• 🤖 Safari has introduced an MCP server in its latest preview release, providing agents with a way to connect to a Safari window and emulate the user experience while debugging.

• shadcn/ui has switched to Base UI as its default component library (from Radix). Radix isn't going away, but Base UI is recommended for new projects.

• PocketJS is a project that brings a JavaScript VM, Vue Vapor, and Solid UI into an 8MB memory budget, and can, curiously, run on the Sony PSP, as well as in WASM and natively on macOS.

• 📈 Commit History is an online tool that creates charts of a user's GitHub commits over time. A nice addition for your profile README, or check out Sindre Sorhus's chart to see the legendary maintainer's consistency over the years.

• 🎉 PGlite, a WebAssembly build of Postgres for use in JavaScript environments, celebrates reaching 10 million weekly downloads while explaining the use cases and how to get started with it yourself.