In this episode, we have a nice and long talk with Andy Wingo (@andywingo) about the new features found in JavaScript ES6 (or ES2015, as they call it now). Andy has been (and still is) a key contributor to open source js engines like SpiderMonkey for Firefox or V8 for Google Chrome. After doing a quick travel through the strange history of this unique language, we review the big changes and new features that ES6 provides and the state of implementation on popular browsers and engines. Andy also give us some insight about how it is to contribute to open-source js engines, and finally we review some of the upcoming features in next revisions of the language.

Show Notes

• The Long and Windy Road to ES6
  • Early Days: from LiveScript to ES3
    • JSJ: The Origin of JavaScript with Brendan Eich (devchat.tv)
    • Crockford on JavaScript: Part 1 and Part 2 (youtube.com)
  • Road to Perdition: ES4
    • Proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition (ecmascript.org)
  • The Oslo Connectrion: ES5
    • ECMAScript 5th Edition (ecma-international.org)
  • Harmony of the Spheres: ES6
    • Current status of ES6 implementations (github.io)
    • Mixing Promises and Generators (html5rocks.com)
    • Try ES6 new features live (learnharmony.org)
    • Babel transpiler to convert ES6 code to ES5 (babeljs.io)
• Contributing to ES6 engines
  • State of JS implementations (wingolog.org)
  • Self-hosted JS (youtube.com)
• ES7 and Beyond
  • Object.observe() (github.io)
  • Hamsa: Simple data-binding and observable model (gethamsa.com)
  • Data Parallelism (smallcultfollowing.com)
  • Async and Await (jakearchibald.com)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:16:40 — 35.2MB)