6 items tagged “ecmascript”
2025
tc39/proposal-regex-escaping. I just heard from Kris Kowal that this proposal for ECMAScript has been approved for ECMA TC-39:
Almost 20 years later, @simon’s RegExp.escape idea comes to fruition. This reached “Stage 4” at ECMA TC-39 just now, which formalizes that multiple browsers have shipped the feature and it’s in the next revision of the JavaScript specification.
I'll be honest, I had completely forgotten about my 2006 blog entry Escaping regular expression characters in JavaScript where I proposed that JavaScript should have an equivalent of the Python re.escape() function.
It turns out my post was referenced in this 15 year old thread on the esdiscuss mailing list, which evolved over time into a proposal which turned into implementations in Safari, Firefox and soon Chrome - here's the commit landing it in v8 on February 12th 2025.
One of the best things about having a long-running blog is that sometimes posts you forgot about over a decade ago turn out to have a life of their own.
2023
download-esm: a tool for downloading ECMAScript modules
I’ve built a new CLI tool, download-esm, which takes the name of an npm package and will attempt to download the ECMAScript module version of that package, plus all of its dependencies, directly from the jsDelivr CDN—and then rewrite all of the import statements to point to those local copies.
[... 1,240 words]2008
ECMAScript Harmony. John Resig explains the outcome of the recent “Oslo meeting” where proponents of ECMAScript 3.1 (incremental improvements to JS as it exists today) and 4 (massive, sweeping changes including many new programming constructs) harmonised their differences. The combined effort is closer to 3.1 than it is to 4, which I think is the right decision.
2007
The Story Behind ES4. If you’re scratching your head at the recent eruption of acrimony surrounding ECMAScript 4 (the next standardised version of JavaScript) Neil Mix has a relatively easy to follow catch-up post.
J4P5: Javascript For PHP 5 (via) “J4P5 is a JavaScript interpreter written in PHP 5, that allows to run untrusted scripts in a sandbox on your server. It aims to implement most of Ecma-262 3rd edition.”
ECMAScript 4 Reference Implementation. Including discussion of the benefits of writing it in Standard ML.