Should JavaScript be split into two languages? New Google-driven proposal divides opinion • DEVCLASS
A Google engineer presented a proposal to the official standardization committee that would split JavaScript into two languages, a core to be implemented by runtime engines and a more capable variant which depends on tools that compile it down to that core.
The presentation was at a meeting of Emca TC39 earlier this month, TC39 [https://tc39.es] being the committee of Ecma International that evolves the JavaScript (officially ECMAScript) specifiation.
Shu-yu Guo, a staff software engineer at Google who specializes in JITs, VMs, compilers and standardization, made the presentation, with slides that were co-authored by Guo along with others from Mozilla, Apple, Moddable and Sony. Moddable is a company which offers an open source SDK for embedded programming, including the XS JavaScript engine.
The authors argue that new language features have a mostly negative impact on users. New features “almost always” worsen security, performance is “neutral to negatively impacted,” stability is sometimes worse, and app features are only improved if developers use what is new.
