What is Harmony?
Many web developers have felt relief to hear that EcmaScript 4 (ES4) standard project fell apart. Through quite a long post “The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization“, Douglas Crockford told us why EcmaScript standard must be revised to cope up with changes on modern web but ES4 has not been mature enough to be realized.
In deeper details, John Resig explained how current ES4 will not reach a sensible result and why it should be merged with ES 3.1 to create the next specification (code name Harmony).
The ECMAScript 4 specification development was very ad-hoc in nature (primarily tackled by Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, and Google): Implementors agreed upon a set of features that they wished to implement and a specification was molded out of the remaining consensus. Building a specification tailored by implementation is a very pragmatic means of reaching a reasonable result.
However there was a fundamental split related to how much of the specification should be implemented. Enter ECMAScript 3.1. This working group (lead by Microsoft and Yahoo) set out to implement some minor changes and bug fixes to ECMAScript 3 while remaining as a subset of full ECMAScript 4 functionality.
These two groups continued to work side-by-side but a struggle was inevitable. The ECMAScript 3.1 group wanted to add changes to the language that would affect the result of ECMAScript 4. This struggle over the past year finally came to a head this past month at the meeting of TC39 (the committee responsible for both ECMAScript 4 and ECMAScript 3.1). Dubbed “the Oslo meeting” this discussion between the two groups saw an ultimate conclusion: The two efforts had to be merged, otherwise neither one would succeed.
You may be confused with the “name soup” of JavaScript, JavaScript 2, ECMAScript (3, 4 and 3.1), ActionScript, Tamarin etc. Right? Just find clear explanations of such terms from another post by Alex Russell.
So, now (near) future of JavaScript can be seen via the Harmony project with some new features we can certainly expect:
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