JavaScript Weekly Issue 736: May 16, 2025

JavaScript’s New Superpower? Explicit Resource Management — V8 v13.8 introduces the idea of deterministic resource cleanup. Among a range of new symbols and objects for the task, the basic idea is you can wrap any file handle, stream or connection in a using/await using block and the runtime will handle any cleanup once resources go out of scope.

Rezvan Mahdavi Hezaveh (V8)

Write CSS Like a Pro — Kevin Powell shares how to create a responsive website from scratch using modern CSS features (such as nesting, utility classes, custom properties, and more). This detailed video course also dives into adding additional polish via animations, view transitions, and more.

Frontend Masters

Basecoat: shadcn/ui‘s Magic, But Minus React — shadcn/ui is a popular suite of well designed React components, but if you’d like to use them in other contexts too, Basecoat is for you. Basecoat ports the components to a more vanilla form you can use with your framework (or not) of choice.

Ronan Berder

JavaScript, When (and What) is this? — Dives into the complexities of the this keyword, explaining how its value is ultimately determined by the context in which a function is called, rather than where it’s defined. It’s been many years since we’ve covered this elementary topic, but this is a fantastic fresh two-part take.

Mat

Building a React App with GitHub Copilot — A good walkthrough, complete with video, if you prefer, of bringing together several of GitHub Copilot’s features for building a modern JavaScript app quickly.

Kedasha Kerr (GitHub)

Regular Expressions in JavaScript — Powerful but often misunderstood, many will benefit from this roundup of the potential regexes offer to JavaScript developers.

Adebayo Adams

ANSIS 4.0: ANSI Color Library for Everywhere — A library to use the power of ANSI escape sequences for coloring and styling text in many environments including the terminal, Chromium-based browsers, Node, Bun, Deno, and even Next.js. v4.0 is a big upgrade with enough breaking changes to warrant a migration guide for existing users.

webdiscus

Introducing Clerk Billing — Set up subscriptions in your B2B or B2C app without writing custom payment code or building your own UI.

Clerk

Fx 36.0: A Command-Line JSON Viewer & Processing Tool — It’s written in Go, but if you’ve got some files full of JSON that you want to slice and dice, Fx is for you (it’s easy to install). This week’s v36 release adds support for streaming JSON and tailing such streams, it’s also much faster and less memory hungry when parsing large JSON files. A solid update for a handy tool.

Anton Medvedev