THE WEEKLY DEV'S BREW #28 ☕

Ripple Framework: When Experience Meets Experimentation

The Creator's Pedigree Matters This isn't another weekend framework project. The developer behind Ripple has shipped production code for Inferno, React Hooks, Lexical, and Svelte 5. When someone with that track record says they've been "collecting ideas and intriguing thoughts," you pay attention.

What Makes Ripple Different Ripple takes a TypeScript-first approach with its own .ripple file extension. This design choice gives the framework freedom to create a superset language that integrates cleanly with TypeScript and JSX while adding framework-specific enhancements.

The reactive state management uses $ prefixed variables (familiar if you've used Svelte), and native CSS styling gets scoped to components using standard <style> elements. Industry-leading performance claims come with the territory, backed by fine-grain rendering architecture.

VSCode integration ships day one with syntax highlighting, real-time diagnostics, TypeScript integration, and IntelliSense support. The tooling experience feels surprisingly mature for such an early-stage project.

Reality Check You can try it out with their Vite template. Look, we know what you're thinking… another frontend framework? But it's actually been a while since something this genuinely promising has come along, and we're curious to see where this project goes.

The creator is refreshingly honest: "plenty of bugs, things just won't work, and TODOs everywhere." This is exploration-stage software, not production-ready tooling. But sometimes the most interesting innovations emerge from passionate side projects.

SolidStart 2.0: DeVinxi and the Vite Migration

Partnership Changes Everything SolidStart just announced a game-changing partnership with Anomaly, creating a dedicated task force for framework development and maintenance. This isn't just about code – it's about sustainable open source development.

Technical Architecture Shift The headline feature: replacing Vinxi with a pure Vite-based system. The "DeVinxi" initiative represents a fundamental architectural change, with a clear three-phase release plan:

• 2.0.0-alpha: Feature parity with current 1.x.x

• 2.0.0-beta: Solid 2.x.x compatibility

• 2.0.0 stable: Battle-tested and regression-free

Beyond 2.0: Streaming and Realtime Focus Looking toward late 2025, the team plans enhanced developer experience for streaming and realtime applications. Their philosophy remains unchanged: "primitives, not frameworks" – providing flexible ergonomics with strong defaults while bridging MPA and SPA tradeoffs.

Andreas Kling: Building Browsers from Scratch

Why This Conversation Matters Our latest podcast episode features Andreas Kling discussing the Ladybird browser engine, one of the most ambitious projects in modern web development. Building a browser engine in 2025 means implementing thousands of web standards while competing with decades of optimization work.

Andreas walks through the technical challenges: memory management strategies, CSS layout algorithms, and the complexity of modern web applications. But the technical insights, while fascinating, aren't the real story.

What really shines through is Andreas's genuine passion for the open web and his unwavering belief that diversity in browser engines is crucial for the health of the internet. His enthusiasm for building something that serves developers and users alike is absolutely infectious. Thanks for joining us, Andreas – conversations like these remind us why we fell in love with web development in the first place.

🎧 Listen to the full episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvK182i9cgE

Quick Sips ☕

Rspack 1.5: Barrel file optimization now stable – automatically detects side-effect free barrel files and defers building until needed. Real-world benchmarks show 20% faster build times and 49% fewer module resolutions. Plus lazy compilation for dynamic imports and TypeScript enum inlining enabled by default.

Speeding Up Semver: Marvin Hagemeister's latest deep dive shows how the semver library used in npm, yarn, and pnpm can be made ~33x faster. A fascinating look at performance optimization in the JavaScript ecosystem through better parsing and avoiding unnecessary validation steps.

Native HTML Dialog Light Dismiss: The new closedby attribute lets you dismiss <dialog> elements by clicking the backdrop with just HTML – no JavaScript required. Works everywhere except Safari, making it perfect for progressive enhancement.

shadcn/ui CLI 3.0: The big August drop brought a complete CLI rewrite with namespaced registries (@registry/name format), private registry support with authentication, and an MCP server for all registries. Plus new search, view, and diff commands to preview components before installing. The kind of workflow improvements that make you wonder how we managed before.

Share the Brew ☕

Think your developer friends would enjoy their weekly dose of dev news with a coffee twist? Good coffee is meant to be shared, and so are good dev insights.

Forward this email to a friend who codes, or share it on your favorite social platform. Every developer deserves their perfect morning brew of tech news.

Coffee Fact of the Week ☕

The espresso shot "crema" – that golden foam layer on top – actually forms because coffee oils are emulsified under the 9 bars of pressure during extraction. It's basically a natural coffee foam art that happens every time, no barista skills required. Unlike JavaScript frameworks, which also emerge under pressure but require significantly more skill to make look good.

Happy coding & brewing!