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11 JavaScript Utility Libraries you Should Know in 2019 by Jonathan Saring

Tip: Use Bit to discover and install specific functions from these libraries. You can find many of them in the Bit community, or share your own. Take a look.

Notes

2018 Insights

1. Underscore & Lodash (dah)

Lodash - 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.

Underscore - Underscore was built to provide utility functions for common tasks in Javascript.

2. Ramda

Ramda - This JS utility library is designed for functional programming, making it easy to create functional pipelines that don’t mutate user data.

Worth Noting: Immutable.js

3. MathJS

MathJS - Math.js is an extensive math library for JavaScript and Node.js, which is compatible with JavaScript’s built-in Math library.

4. Moment/date-fns

Moment - moment.js is a JavaScript date and time manipulation library for parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates.

Date-fns - 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.

5. Sugar

Sugar - Sugar is a Javascript utility library for working with native objects.

6. Lazy

Lazy - 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.

7. CollectJS

CollectJS - 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

8. ChanceJS

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.

9. ChartJS

ChartJS - chart.js is a great example of how sometimes less is more with 8 different data visualization types, each of them animated and customizable.

10. Polished

Polished - Polished is a great lightweight toolset for writing styles in JavaScript with Sass-style helper functions and mixins.

11. Mout

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).

Honourable Mentions

Voca - A Javascript library for string manipulations.

Licia

Licia - A simple collection of useful JavaScript snippets with high docs and test coverage with Zero dependencies.

Licia Explanation Article

Other Reads: Brenden Eich about Javascript Ecosystem