Geneva, 2 July 2015
On June 17, 2015 the 109th Ecma General Assembly approved the Standards:
- ECMA-262 6th edition – ECMAScript® 2015 Language Specification
- ECMA-402 2nd edition – ECMAScript® 2015 Internationalization API Specification.
As Mr. Allen Wirfs-Brock (Mozilla Research Fellow), the ECMA-262 6th Edition Project Editor explained to the Press that the approval of ECMAScript 6 means for developers, browsers, etc the most significant update to ECMAScript since 1999, which has now been completed and has become a formal standard. Browser developers can now complete their implementations of ECMAScript 2015 features knowing that the specification is final and no longer subject to change.
Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls. The ECMAScript library of built-ins has been expanded to support additional data abstractions including maps, sets, and arrays of binary numeric values as well as additional support for Unicode supplemental characters in strings and regular expressions. The built-ins are now extensible via subclassing.
TC39’s intent is that ECMAScript 2015 is the new foundation for the future of ECMAScript. Rather than waiting 5-15 years for another major revision, TC39 intends to better respond to the needs of Web developers by making annual incremental enhancements to the ECMAScript specification. So formally ECMA-262 6th Edition is also called “ECMAScript 2015”. Hopefully ECMA-262 7th Edition will be called “ECMAScript 2016” and so on.
Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, the Secretary General of Ecma added that ECMA-262 6th Edition and ECMA-402 2nd Editions and ECMA-404 1st Edition (JSON) are one of the Ecma Standards that have been developed under the new Royalty-Free (RF) patent policy option. Only a very few formal standard developing organizations can claim to have a patent policy that allows to develop a standard either under a FRAND (usually for a license fee) or a RF (free of license charges) regime. The latter (usually required for base Internet and Web standards) guarantees that at least those members who have developed the standard have committed not to charge any royalties for the standard. This is not to be confused that also under FRAND policy RF patent statements can be submitted, however there it is not assured that all the patent statements for the standard will be RF and not FRAND.
It is planned that ECMA-262 Ed. 6, ECMA-402 2nd Edition and ECMA-404 1st Edition (all part of one package) will be submitted for fast-track approval to ISO/IEC JTC 1, where also the earlier editions of ECMAScript have been fast-tracked.
As of the day of this News since June 17, 2015 ECMA-262 Ed. 6 has been downloaded some 12,000 from the Ecma website or accessed some 19,000 times in the html version. This is in the history of Ecma International a very high figure.
For more information see also the following press reports on ECMAScript Ed. 6:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/06/ecmascript-2015-es6
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2937716/javascript/its-official-ecmascript-6-is-approved.html
http://sdtimes.com/ecmascript-6-is-officially-a-standard/
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/577846/it-official-ecmascript-6-approved/
For more information: please contact Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, Secretary General of Ecma International. Email: istvan@dev.ecma-international.org.