JS0/JSSugar: the tooling will continue until morale improves

The proposal from Google was to split the standard into: JS0, the language implemented by engines, and JSSugar, an extended syntax that tools like WebPack will compile to JS0.

They argue that new features are placing a performance and security burden on JS engines, which puts the implementors at odds with JavaScript developers - who are demanding new syntactic sugar (apparently). By splitting the standard, Google hope that JSSugar could continue to evolve quickly while JS0 grows more gradually.

I too want engines to focus on security, performance, and capabilities that cannot be de-sugared (and so are impossible today). But, please, don't grant official status to the current crop of JavaScript tooling.

Many JavaScript developers, myself included, would like to rely less on these tools. There are a huge number of use-cases that - with ES modules and HTTP3 - could be built without pre-compilation. JavaScript might finally be accessible to newcomers and fun once more!

I imagine if you work at Google, that is true. But I suspect most developers are not professionals working at a tech giant but hobbyists doing their best in a confounding ecosystem of tooling. If we give up on shipping their simple code directly to a browser, what hope have they of putting down those tools in future?

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