ECMAScript and JavaScript
Explore the connection between ECMAScript and JavaScript, understand different ECMAScript versions, and learn how transpilation helps browsers support the latest JavaScript features. This lesson equips you to work confidently with modern JavaScript workflows.
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Background
Working with JavaScript, you might come across the term "ECMAScript", or abbreviations like "ES6" or "ES10". In this lesson, we will break down these terms and elaborate on ECMAScript in JavaScript.
Introduction to ECMAScript
ECMAScript is a syntactic standard for programming languages. Among many languages, JavaScript conforms to ECMAScript specifications. ECMA stands for European Computer Manufacturer’s Association. ECMAScript is used to create languages, more specifically scripting languages. Meanwhile, JavaScript itself is a scripting language.
Versions of ECMAScript
ECMAScript releases bring out new features or updates. Over the years, ECMAScript versions have been developed, where the initial versions are listed below.
The major two releases were ECMAScript 5 and ECMAScript 6. As of 2017, all modern web browsers supported ES5. The rest support at least ES3. After the release of ECMAScript 6, there have been yearly releases with incremental changes such as ES7 in 2016, ES8 in 2017, and so on. With increasing versions and new features, not all browsers support the same ECMAScript conforming JavaScript. The latest release may not be adopted by the majority of the JavaScript engines. What do web browsers do in these cases? Transpilation.
Transpilation
Transpilation is the process of converting source code written in one language to another language. Because not all browsers understand all ECMAScript versions, transpilers are used.