2024 was the first full calendar year since jswzl’s release. A lot happened. We wanted to capture the big highlights of the previous year, starting with 2024.1.1 and ending with 2025.1.1, which was released today.

New features

Last year, we saw a bunch of new features, extending the capabilities of jswzl and making the user experience more seamless.

• Lots of new descriptor extractors for different types of code.
• Sources from source maps and packed sources are now extracted into a “Virtual Source Tree”, which can be browsed in a way that is similar to how it’s presented in the Chrome Dev Tools.
• You can now hide descriptor types that are not relevant to your bug hunting.
• Individual requests can now be deleted from the source tree.

Integrations

A big focus was also put on ensuring that jswzl works in the user's preferred environment and tools.

• We started shipping a native arm64 build for macOS on Apple Silicon.
• We made the API to ingest data into jswzl available for people to integrate with their tools of choice.
• We added documentation to the GraphQL schema, making it easier to read data from jswzl using your own custom tools.

Performance

Performance was also a major theme last year. Several releases individually reduced loading time, CPU usage, and memory usage by 25-75% each. When jswzl was first released, it was strongly advised that people run the server on a beefy workstation or server. But that has changed, and any reasonable laptop will run it without issues. Looking ahead to 2025, there are still performance improvements to come that will make jswzl even lighter on your system.

Non-visible work

A lot of the work last year would not be immediately obvious to users, but was felt indirectly through things like performance improvements across the board from upgrading from .NET 6 to .NET 8. This also involved a lot of retooling to create a packaged executable that performed better across all platforms, upgrading dependencies, and switching dependencies in some cases to better alternatives.

Improvements to come

Despite all of these big improvements, there were also things we wanted to ship in 2024 that did not manifest despite our best intentions. The most obvious example is an official plugin for Caido, which is at the very top of our priority list for Q1 2025. There are a handful of improvements that were started work on in 2024, which will be out in 2025. Some are user-facing, while other are not user facing. Like upgrading to .NET 9 with all of its performance and memory management improvements!

‍