Our company ported moderate chunks of business logic to JavaScript. We compile the code with a minifier, which further improves performance. Since the language is dynamically typed, it lends itself well to obfuscation, which occurs as a byproduct of minification. We went to great efforts to ensure it positively screams, performance-wise. We can now do what we did before, faster, better, with less code, on more platforms. In summary, we are very satisfied with the current state of the language.
I personally love the language especially for its cross-platform nature. So naturally, I read up a lot about the state of JavaScript compilers, performance and compatibility across as many browsers and platforms as I have time to research.
The one theme which has been growing louder and louder these days, is the news about ECMAScript 6. So far, what I have been able to gather is that ES6 promises a better development experience; firstly by enabling new ways to do things, secondly by reporting errors early. This sounds great for those who are still waiting for the language to meet their needs before jumping on board.
But we have already jumped on board in a big way. Sure, I expect that we will have to do ongoing maintenance and feature revisions on our code through the years, and that we would obviously make use of best practices at the time. But I don’t see us refactoring major portions of it to take advantage of language features that are mostly intended to boost developer productivity.
I keep wondering, what impact will the language advances ultimately have on our existing, well-written, well-performing code base? Is there something I am missing? Is there something we ought to look out for? Does anyone have tips or guidance on how we should approach the ecmascript.next finalization? Should we care?
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what impact will the language advances ultimately have on our existing, well-written, well-performing code base?
Hardly any.
One of the reasons that the progress of ECMAScript specs is slow (compared to languages like python, ruby etc.) is they care very (and I mean very) much about the tons of existing code out there, which mustn’t break. Lots of proposal which looked as progressive were rollbacked once it has been shown it can break the web. Other langauges do not have such burden, they can issue incompatible new version, user of app can do the right setup, but web is another story.
Maybe someone more competent can add more, I am only telling as a member of mailing list where ECMAScript 6 development is discussed between TC39 commitee members, as well as plain developers.