You Don't Know JS: ES6 & Beyond

Chapter 8. Beyond ES6

At the time of this writing, the final draft of ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) is shortly headed toward its final official vote of approval by ECMA. But even as ES6 is being finalized, the TC39 committee is already hard at work at on features for ES7/2016 and beyond.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, it’s expected that the cadence of progress for JS is going to accelerate from updating once every several years to having an official version update once per year (hence the year-based naming). That alone is going to radically change how JS developers learn about and keep up with the language.

But even more importantly, the committee is actually going to work feature by feature. As soon as a feature is spec-complete and has its kinks worked out through implementation experiments in a few browsers, that feature will be considered stable enough to start using. We’re all strongly encouraged to adopt features once they’re ready instead of waiting for some official standards vote. If you haven’t already learned ES6, the time is past due to get on board!

As the time of this writing, a list of future proposals and their status can be seen here.

Transpilers and polyfills are how we’ll bridge to these new features even before all browsers we support have implemented them. Babel, Traceur, and several other major transpilers already have support for some of the post-ES6 features that are most likely to stabilize.

With that in mind, it’s already time for us to look at some ...