Welcome to the 3rd annual OSScars

Today’s issue: Rolling out the red carpet, torrenting JavaScript textbooks, and removing V8 from my MySpace Top 8.

Welcome to a very special #270.

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The OSScars, Part 1

Welcome to the 3rd annual OSScars, where we hand out very real awards (that we made up) to some of the best and brightest OSS projects in the JavaScript ecosystem.

I’m your host, notJimmyKimmel, which means I have an actual personality and am capable of expressing humor in the English language.

Thanks for dressing your best by wearing that one open-source framework t-shirt you got at a conference back in 2017, and good luck to all our nominees.

The OSScar goes to…

Best Cinematography: TanStack. Their suite of type-safe libraries already provide powerful utilities for state management, routing, data viz, tables, and charts. And they’re currently working on another big addition to the TCU (TanStack Cinematic Universe) with TanStack Start, a WIP full-stack React framework. I’m looking forward to another cinematic hype video from Tanner once it goes live.

Best Costume Design: shadcn/ui. Like all great costumes, great open-source components are beautiful, memorable, and easy to customize. shadcn/ui checks all those boxes and allows JavaScript devs to copy-and-paste their way into thinking that they’re competent designers.

Best Director: Devon Govett. The creator of React Aria, Parcel, and Lightning CSS saw all three of his tools take a major leap in popularity this year, while he continued to ship meaningful new releases for each one. Tailwind CSS is currently integrating Lightning CSS directly into its framework, which should take the “extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier” to a whole new level of usage.

*Generic orchestra music starts playing*

We’ll be right back with the rest of the OSScar winners after a quick word from our sponsor.

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Pieces Copilot vs. GitHub Copilot

GH Copilot is great, but every gamer knows that you need to upgrade your default weapon eventually.

That’s why thousands of developers have switched to Pieces Copilot. It’s 100% free for individuals, and it comes with more powerful features:

• Goes beyond the IDE and connects to your entire workflow (browser extensions, devtools, and more). It persists saved materials and conversations with the copilot to keep you in flow and help you pick up where you left off.

• More contextual — you can upload files, folders, screenshots, and code snippets to get help on more complex problems, and generate code that isn’t just boilerplate.

• Lets you use multiple LLMs — including local LLMs like Mistral, so it can work on-device for higher security, just like their entire storage and auto-enrichment engine.

Download the desktop app for free to try it out for yourself.

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The OSScars, Part 2

Best Breakthrough Performance: Hono. This edge-first web framework has seen some explosive growth since it broke onto the scene last year (7x increase in npm downloads). This is largely thanks to its best-in-class performance, driven by its super-fast RegExpRouter and the fact that it’s built on web standards.

Best Supporting Actor/Actress: Vite. This is the second year in a row Vite has won this award, but it felt blasphemous to choose anyone else. Its npm downloads are up 3x in the last year, and it helps power Astro, SvelteKit, Remix, and just about any other framework you can think of. Vite has officially reached Samuel L. Jackson status — where just adding Vite to your production instantly makes it seem cooler, tougher, and more intimidating.

Best Independent Film: htmx. Like most indie films, everyone loves to talk about how great htmx is, despite the fact that they’ve never actually used it. That’s how you know the htmx team’s extended PSYOP meme-based marketing campaign is working.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Turso. With PlanetScale dropping its free tier last week, someone had to step up and support all those orphaned side projects. Turso was happy to help.

Lifetime Achievement Award: CSS. Much like Jamie Lee Curtis, CSS has been around forever but is reinventing itself in exciting new ways. We’ve seen new features like the :has() selector, CSS variables, and container queries make life genuinely easier for developers — and cross-browser compatibility has never been better.

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1. Houssein Djirdeh wrote on the Chrome blog about Developing a Next.js package for managing third-party libraries. Thankfully, this particular Google project didn’t receive quite as much backlash as the last Gemini release.

2. The Vite team just released a new landing page for Rolldown — the WIP, Rust-based bundler for JavaScript that’s Rollup-compatible and will eventually be used in Vite.

3. Product for Engineers is PostHog’s newsletter dedicated to helping engineers improve their product skills. It comes with deep dives on top startups, their lessons and mistakes from building PostHog, advice for crafting great products, and unreasonably cute hedgehog illustrations. [sponsored]

4. Arisa Fukuzaki wrote about Internationalization with Remix, so you can make sure your site is approved by Pitbull, aka Mr. Worldwide.

5. TypeScript 5.4 was just released with a bunch of minor new features, including a new NoInfer utility type.

6. CarbonQA provides high-quality QA services for dev teams, so you never have to waste engineering time on QA testing ever again. Their US-based QA testers work directly in your tools and help you catch bugs before something breaks. [sponsored]

7. Puter just open-sourced their advanced, highly extensible desktop environment in the browser, which is helpful for building remote desktop environments, remote servers, and more.

8. Marijn Haverbeke just released the 4th edition of the Eloquent JavaScript online textbook. It’s free, so unlike most of the online textbooks you used in college, you don’t need to worry about torrenting it and infecting every computer in your dorm with the world’s worst malware.

9. Jen Simmons and Jon Davis wrote about the new WebKit Features in Safari 17.4.

10. Antonello Zanini wrote about the Top 8 recent V8 updates. It’s a good article, but I’m still not quite ready to forgive Antonello for removing me from his MySpace Top 8 back in 2006.