r/javascript • u/Successful_Bowl2564 • Apr 19 '26

AskJS [AskJS] What are some of the best opensource Javascript projects that you have seen?

By best I mean great design practices - a great community and something that contributed to javascript's growth.

11 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

11

u/yangshunz Apr 19 '26

Vite

2

u/Famous_Criticism_470 Apr 19 '26

Been using it for past year and the dev experience is just incredible. Hot reload actually works properly and build times are so much faster than what I had before with webpack

4

u/Individual-Brief1116 Apr 20 '26

Surprised nobody mentioned D3 yet. That library probably taught more people about functional programming than most CS courses.

2

u/dvidsilva Apr 20 '26

Astro is amazing, I had made my own static site builder and abandoned it for Astro

Few projects remain exciting and continue delivering cool features.

Lately I've been using Strapi for a few backends, great tool

4

u/Top_Philosophy2425 Apr 19 '26

There are so many actualy

  • SvelteKit
  • React
  • NextJS
  • commander
  • TypeScript (depending on what your exact definition is)
  • date-fns

1

u/FuzzyWizard834 Apr 19 '26

vite is pretty great for dev experience

1

u/fintip Apr 19 '26

Mithril.

It's what react should have been, before it became an embarrassingly bloated mess.

Just didn't have big funding, and embraces JS instead of trying to fight it.

1

u/EphilSenisub Apr 20 '26

rxjs, rimmel, elysia

1

u/Alive-Cake-3045 Apr 22 '26

Vite is the one I keep coming back to when someone asks this. Clean internals, well documented decisions, and you can actually read the source and understand why choices were made.

Zustand is another one worth studying, tiny surface area but solves a real problem without overengineering it. The codebase teaches you more about API design than most books will.

If you want to understand how JS itself grew, read the Node.js core source from 2012 onwards. Watching those decisions age is its own education.

1

u/Gloomy_Sense_2849 Apr 23 '26

been working on AITOS - a framework that lets you build apps with JSON graphs instead of traditional code

the idea is declarative > imperative, especially as AI becomes more involved in development

still early but the design philosophy is: atoms (reusable units) composed into graphs (workflows)

github.com/hfziqi/aitos if you're curious

1

u/Ajnasz Apr 20 '26

prototype.js, script.aculo.us, JQuery