Bun 1.4 is (finally) fresh out of the oven

#​799 — August 25, 2026

Read on the Web

🏖️ I'm back from an intense week of Disney vacationing with the family, so I feel more tired than before I left 😅… but it's time to catch up with all things JavaScript!
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

JavaScript Weekly

Bun 1.4: Now More Node.js Compatible Than Ever — Several weeks after it was initially expected to launch, Bun's big AI-powered rewrite from Zig to Rust is here, complete with traditional ▶️ release video. A lot of effort has been put into compatibility, not just with Node, but Next.js, Playwright, Vitest, and Nuxt too. Throughput and CPU/memory usage also see huge improvements.

The Bun Team

☕ Grab the biggest coffee you can if you intend to get through the release post. It's easily the longest I've ever seen in fifteen years of running this newsletter.

Webflow for Developers — Most tools make you choose between visual builders and real code. Webflow gives you both: APIs, SDKs, Code Components, and Webflow Cloud to deploy custom apps, plus an MCP server to build with agents.

Webflow sponsor

🎵 Music Theory for JavaScript Developers — A from-first-principles tour of music theory, deriving the twelve notes, scales, chords and progressions from plain arithmetic, with runnable Web Audio examples throughout.

Luke Haas

Solid 2.0 RC: The Big — Async now lives in the reactive graph, so async data flows through ordinary memos. createResource, batch and startTransition are gone. SolidStart gets retired into a start: true flag on the Vite plugin, and the API is now frozen.

Ryan Carniato

IN BRIEF:

• Aurora Scharff shows off how Next.js 16.3 helps developers build 'app-like' experiences.
• Aviv Keller presents a recap of everything from Node.js Interactive 2026 which took place in Atlanta two weeks ago.
• 🤖 TanStack AI has entered its RC phase with a look at the journey so far and its main feature set.
• Oxlint has gained React Compiler support.

RELEASES:

• Electron 44 – No post yet, but it has dropped 32-bit support, requires macOS 13+, clipboard is now aligned with the W3C Clipboard API, and added net.WebSocket and the ability to set window opacity on Linux.
• Waku 1.0 RC – Minimal RSC-first React framework, now API-frozen ahead of v1 final, adding type-safe navigation that catches bad routes at compile time and experimental instant paints from cached route shells.
• SvelteKit 3 Release Candidate, React Native 0.87, ESLint 10.9 (and 10.9.1), Axios 1.20.0, pnpm 11.23

📖 Articles and Videos

The Wicked Reason Removing Code Beats Better Scheduling — A lot of performance work goes into shuffling when things load, when the bigger win is usually not sending the code at all. Alex Russell makes the case that this is a management problem more than a technical one.

Alex Russell

ESM and CommonJS: What import and require Actually Do — They look like the same operation, but Gabor shows how an ESM import stays wired to the exporter's binding, while a destructured require() only holds a copy. The consequences show up in circular dependencies and published packages.

Gabor Koos

Build with Strategy. Lead with Curiosity — Fidelity is looking for technologists that ask questions, challenge conventions and care about the impact of their products.

Fidelity Careers sponsor

How Cloudflare Moved Its Blog to Its Own WordPress Alternative — How Cloudflare moved its main blog onto EmDash, the Astro CMS it's building. Interesting parts include the k6 load tests and using a proxy Worker to ramp up traffic during switchover.

Jackson, Carneiro, and Dutton (Cloudflare)

📺 The Creator of TypeScript on 10x Faster TypeScript and Why AI Won't Replace SWEs – A candid hour-long interview with Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg. Ryan Peterman

📄 Hiding Internal State in TypeScript Objects – How a non-exported unique symbol used as a property key keeps internal state out of Object.keys and JSON.stringify. Carlos Menezes

📄 Reliable Query Prefetching with TanStack Router Dominik Dorfmeister

📄 I Patched the TypeScript Compiler to Add Up Nine Numbers Hugo Vilela

🛠 Code & Tools

MicroLighter: A 2KB Syntax Highlighter That Doesn't Touch the DOM — A small, client-side syntax highlighter that makes use of the CSS Custom Highlights API. No dependencies, and with themes for light and dark modes. The homepage has some live demos.

Dave Rupert

TermDOM: Build Terminal UIs with HTML, CSS and DOM — A real DOM and layout engine to paint to the terminal, so you can write a TUI with vanilla JS (or framework of choice) and HTML (not just React, as with Ink). This week's v0.1.5 release adds CSS grid support.

Brian Kim

Full-Text Search in Drizzle Without a Second System — Try the official ParadeDB integration for Drizzle. Search your live Postgres tables. No ETL, no Elasticsearch cluster.

ParadeDB sponsor

Formisch 1.0: Framework-Agnostic Schema-Based Form Library — A headless form library where a Valibot schema drives types and validation across eight frameworks. v1 adds Angular and React Native support, migration guides for TanStack Form/React Hook Form/Formik users, plus Markdown docs for agents.

Formisch Team

Stryker Mutator 10.0: Test Your Tests with Mutation Testing — Stryker makes small, deliberate changes to your code and checks whether your test suite catches them. If it doesn't, your tests may be too lax and need work. Here's how to get started.

Jansen, de Lang, et al.

• Ionic Framework v9 – The mobile-first UI toolkit for React, Angular and Vue returns after a two-year gap with React Router 6 support, zoneless change detection in Angular 21+, and more. There's an upgrade guide for v8 users.
• Papa Parse 5.7 – Fast, flexible CSV-to-JSON and JSON-to-CSV library.
• 🌐 MapLibre GL JS 6.6 – GPU-accelerated vector tile rendering library for interactive maps in the browser.
• 📊 Plotly.js 4.0 – Standalone library for creating interactive data visualizations.
• GTKX 1.3 – Create native GTK-powered Linux desktop apps with React.
• 📺 YouTube.js 18.0 – JavaScript client for YouTube's internal API.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting tidbits in the broader landscape:

• Last week the Next.js team did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit and the thread is packed with answers and insights.
• 🖼️ Jake Archibald posts an update on Firefox's coming support for JPEG XL which Chrome is also planning to support soon.
• 📊 Gajus Kuizinas has put together a CSS-in-JS Arena comparing StyleX, Panda CSS and his own brand new Bamboo CSS on the same React Router 8 app.
• Did you know splitting a git commit is now a single command (in Git 2.54+)? git history split walks the change hunk by hunk and prompts for both messages.
• 🕹️ An N64 emulator written in JavaScript. If you have a ROM file to use, you can play with it here.