State of JavaScript Zoom

sojs.md

State of JavaScript Zoom

Devographics Overview

History

• Meteor.js
• State of JavaScript 2016

Stats

• State of JS: 23,540 respondents
• State of CSS: 9,190 respondents
• State of HTML: 20,904 respondents
• State of React: 13,003 respondents
• Email list audience: 91,368 subscribers

Team

• Sacha Greif (me): lead maintainer
• Eric Burel: part-time CTO
• Volunteer translators and contributors

Funding

• Sponsors
  • Google
  • Frontend Masters
  • TokyoDev
• T-shirt sales

Tech Overview

• Survey app
• API
• Results
• Internal dashboard

Demographics

23,540 respondents

Country

• 16% of respondents from the U.S.
• 19% of respondents from France, Germany, U.K.

Company Size

• 42% of respondents from companies with >100 employees

Gender

• 94% men

Language Pain Points

1. Lack of native static typing
2. ESM/CJS issues
3. Date management

Browser APIs Pain Points

1. Browser support
2. Safari
3. Poor documentation

Libraries

Experience vs Sentiment

• Most used: Webpack

  • The worst moments of my life have all involved Webpack.

• Most heard of (but not used): Svelte

  • Would love to play around with this and others, but who has time for it

• Most loved: Vite

  • Fast, easy to learn, easy to setup, thriving ecosystem.

• Most hated: Gatsby

  • Their "GraphQL for everything" way of working is burdensome.

Changes Over Time

• Vertical axis: Usage
• Horizontal axis: Sentiment
• The “boomerang” trajectory

Retention vs Usage

• “Adopt” quadrant: Storybook, Vite, Vue.js, Next.js, Jest, React

Front-end Frameworks

• React & Vue: really good rankings despite being older projects
• Svelte: the up-and-comer

Meta-frameworks

• Next.js is the clear leader
• Astro is climbing fast

Testing

• Jest is the leader
• Vitest is climbing fast and might overtake it in the next few years

Mobile & Desktop

• Tauri is the up-and-comer
• Everything else is a bit flat

Build Tools

• Webpack still #1 in terms of usage, but poor retention
• Vite is the clear alternative

Monorepo Tools

• pnpm has growing positivity
• Everything else is flat

Other Tools

Back-end

• Express still widely used
• Nest & Fastify are distant #2 and #3

Runtimes

• Bun is a surprising leader in “custom” runtimes

AI Tools

• ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini

Usage

JS/TS Balance

• 72% use more TS than JS
• 32% use TS all the time

Application Patterns

The Big 3:

• 91% have used SPAs
• 62% have used SSR
• 48% have used SSG

Pain Points

• Code Architecture
• State Management
• Build Tools

Missing Features

• Lack of static typing
• Lack of standard library
• Poor date management

Resources

• Courses: Udemy (1195)
• Podcasts: Syntax (1000)
• Video Creators: Fireship (2654)
• People: Midudev (357)

The #1 YouTuber has a larger audience than the #1 coure platform, podcast, and influencer combined.

Next Steps

Survey

• UX improvements (faster, light mode, accessibility, etc.)

API

• Support cross-questions queries (e.g. get merged list of all pain points)
• Support cross-survey queries (e.g. compare State of JS and State of CSS salaries)

Results

• Integrate historical data (e.g. item X gained +3 ranks since last year)
• Integrate web-features (https://captainbrosset.github.io/web-features-explorer/)

Dashboard

• Handle large amounts of freeform answers better

Q&A