11 JavaScript Utility Libraries you Should Know in 2019
11 Useful Javascript utility libraries to speed your development.
As Javascript remains the most popular and widely used programming language in 2019, so grows the ecosystem around it.
Still, Javascript’s small “standard library” is expected to stay this way. To fill the gap, many popular utility libraries have grown on GitHub in the past few years. Here is a shortlist of useful and highly maintained libraries.
TIP and important update:
We recommend using Bit to create a modular toolbox of JS utils you can instantly use across your applications and projects. It’s the fastest, most scalable way to do it and since every util is a “component” you can easily manage and update these functions across your codebase. Learn more:
1. Underscore & Lodash (dah)
Most of you probably already know them. Underscore was built to provide utility functions for common tasks in Javascript. Lodash, NPM’s most downloaded and most dependent-upon package, was built to provide more consistent cross-environment iteration support for arrays, strings, objects, and arguments objects. It has since became a superset of Underscore, and both are maintained by the same core contributors. Should definitely be in your stack.
2. Ramda
At over 12K stars, this JS utility library is designed for functional programming, making it easy to create functional pipelines that don’t mutate user data. Immutability and side-effect free functions are at the heart of its design philosophy. All functions are automatically curried, and passed parameters are arranged accordingly for ease of use.
- Also check out: immutable.js
3. MathJS
At 6K stars, Math.js is an extensive math library for JavaScript and Node.js, which is compatible with JavaScript’s built-in Math library. The library contains a flexible expression parser, is able to perform symbolic computation, and comes with a large set of built-in functions and constants. You can even extend it yourself.
4. Moment/date-fns
At nearly 40K stars, moment.js is a JavaScript date and time manipulation library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates. Moment was designed to work both in the browser and in Node.js. As of v 2.10.0 the code is written in ECMAScript 6 modules.
Date-fns is a growingly popular (11K stars, over half a million weekly NPM installs) time manipulation library for Javascript, chosen by many developers to replace moment.js (see comparison) providing over 130 functions to manipulate dates in the browser and Node.js. Date-fns is built using pure functions and keeps things immutable while not changing passed date instances. It works well with bundlers such as webpack, Browserify, or Rollup and also supports tree-shaking.
5. Sugar
At 3.5K stars, Sugar is a Javascript utility library for working with native objects. Custom builds and modularized npm packages let you use only what you need (can also be combined with Bit), and users can define methods or use plugins to handle specialized use cases. Worth checking out.
6. Lazy
At 5K stars, lazy.js is a functional utility library for JavaScript with a lazy engine that “strives to do as little work as possible” while still being flexible enough. The library has no external dependencies, and here’s a live demo of testing DOM events as a sequence. Here are the API docs to get started.
7. CollectJS
At 3.5K stars, collect.js is a very promising and dependency free wrapper for working with arrays and objects in Javascript with dozens of useful functionalities in and API which is (almost) identical to Laravel Collections 5.5. The library is actively maintained, and is worth keeping an eye on.
8. ChanceJS
Chance is a minimalist generator of random strings, numbers, etc. to help reduce some monotony, while writing automated tests or anywhere else you need anything random. At only 3K stars, this library is surprisingly useful as we tend to repeat our patterns when asked to generate random things.
9. ChartJS
At nearly 40k stars, chart.js is a great example of how sometimes less is more with 8 different data visualization types, each of them animated and customizable. Chart.js lets you create simple HTML5 Charts using the <canvas> tag, with great rendering performance across all modern browsers. Definitely one of the most useful and elegant libraries on the list.
10. Polished
At 3.5K stars, authored by the styled-components team, Polished is a great lightweight toolset for writing styles in JavaScript with Sass-style helper functions and mixins. The library is compatible with styled-components, Aphrodite, Radium, or plain inline styles. This personal favorite is available on GitHub, and all single functionalities were made available in Bit’s community (non-official) so they can be individually installed/imported and used.
11. Mout
Mout.js is a collection of modular JavaScript utilities that can be used in the browser as AMD modules or on node.js, providing helper methods similar to those found on other languages standart libraries (Python, Ruby, PHP etc). mout.js lets you load only the modules/functions you need, and provides a consistent API and normalizes behavior across multiple browsers.
Honorable mentions:
* Voca
A Javascript library for string manipulations. It includes helpful functions such as change case, trim, pad, slugify, latinise, sprintf’y, truncate, escape and more. You can load individual functions to minimize the application builds. The library comes with a high-test coverage and has no dependancies.
* Licia
Only at 400 stars, this interesting project is basically a simple collection of useful JavaScript snippets with high docs and test coverage. v 2.0 pre-release in on master, and is actively maintained and developed.
Learn more in this Hackernoon post.
