Top 7 JavaScript zero-dependency Projects

Frappe Charts

2 14,890 2.8 JavaScript

Simple, responsive, modern SVG Charts with zero dependencies (by frappe)

Project mention: Learn SVG with 25 examples – How to code images in HTML | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-12-07

As a frontend dev who also works in UX and graphics from time to time, I find it helpful to be able to do both, looking at SVGs as both a vector graphics format and a human-readable XML. IME the workflow depends more on whether any SVG is meant to be illustrative (like art) or quantitative (like charts) or interactive and animated/mutable (like a game).
For something like this bell example (https://svg-tutorial.com/svg/bell), you can certainly hand-code it if you're really math-inclined and can estimate the formulas of curves just by looking at them, but for us mere mortals, it's easier to just draw out the curves in a graphics app then export as an SVG. And for things like the ringer (is that what you call it? the orange ball thing at the bottom of the bell that strikes the bell to make the sound), being able to visually draw it on a canvas, change its size, drag it around and play with its colors and dimensions, etc. is really helpful. Figma is fine for simpler graphics, but it's really more of a UX tool than a graphic design tool, and Illustrator is a lot more powerful. Inkscape is a FOSS option.
In other circumstances, though, manipulating the SVG XML directly is also very helpful. Let's say you want to programatically generate a bar chart. If you have a big dataset, it's going to take a designer forever to manually plot them and change them every time the data changes. But it's easy for a dev to use Javascript (or any language) to draw each rectangle, programmatically adjust their heights and colors based on the data, add tooltips, etc. And that way you can dynamically update them in real-time whenever the data changes (like if the user selects a different date range, or new events come in). A lot of this is made easier by libs like https://frappe.io/charts or https://apexcharts.com. But before you take that approach, you should know that for complex charts, sometimes Canvas rendering (or just generating graphics in the backend) can be more performant than SVG.
SVGs can also be animated and interactive, not just with CSS transitions but by directly manipulating the XML geometries, like http://snapsvg.io/demos/ or https://www.svgator.com/ or https://codepen.io/collection/XpwMLO/. This is fine for product pages and such, but for really graphics-intensive apps (full games) it's probably slower than other rendering pipelines. (Not my specialty, won't speculate too much.)
TLDR Drawing them in a graphics app is usually easier for the designers, but the XML can be programmatically manipulated afterward to great effect.
JSLint

18 3,596 6.2 JavaScript

JSLint, The JavaScript Code Quality and Coverage Tool

Project mention: Misty Programming Language | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-12-31

This is the spec for the language Douglas Crockford (author of the book "JavaScript: The Good Parts", the JSON specification[1], JSLint[2]) had explained in his famous talk: "The Next Programming Language"[3].
The "big things" in the language are the Actor model, favouring immutability and capabilities-based security.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
[2] https://www.jslint.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2idkNdKqpQ
SurveyJS

surveyjs.io
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Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
picocolors

3 1,170 1.7 JavaScript

The tiniest and the fastest library for terminal output formatting with ANSI colors

Project mention: Comparison of Node.js libraries to colorize text in terminal | dev.to | 2023-09-20

Here are the smallest libs: picocolors (2.6KB), kleur (2.7KB), ansis (3.2KB) and colorette (3.3KB), the rest are at least double larger.
react-apple-signin-auth

0 97 4.2 JavaScript

 Apple signin for React using the official Apple JS SDK
jsonhilo

1 27 6.6 JavaScript

Fast lossless JSON parse event streaming, in JavaScript.
AB-Audio-Player

1 9 4.8 JavaScript

HTML, CSS, JS only A/B audio player. Toggle and compare two versions of the same audio.
icy

1 0 4.5 JavaScript

An icy currency converter.
InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com
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Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020). The latest post mention was on 2023-12-31.