Brian Terlson, Senior program manager at Microsoft, said at the QCon conference in San Francisco that ES6 will be available on June 16, 2016. “Async functions will drastically change the way you write JavaScript code,” Terlson said. According to an article by JavaWorld, similar to async/await capabilities in the C# and Dart languages, async functions are already in the Babel JavaScript compiler and TypeScript.
ECMAScript most recent release, ES6, which was launched almost six years after ES5, brought a few problems regarding the new feature updates from the previous upgrade to the current one due to the long period of time between each update. Therefore, the next ECMAScript releases are expected to launch every year, starting with ES7 in 2016.
According to 2ality.com, these are some of the ECMAScript 2016 might feature:
- Exponentiation Operator (Rick Waldron)
- SIMD.JS – SIMD APIs + polyfill (John McCutchan, Peter Jensen, Dan Gohman, Daniel Ehrenberg)
- Async Functions (Brian Terlson)
- Object.values/Object.entries (Jordan Harband)
- String padding (Jordan Harband & Rick Waldron)
The authors of ECMAScript 2016 said that ECMAScript’s features expected to be included in the new version are still not officially part of the future plan, but ES7 will most probably include the async functions and Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) capabilities which will help exploit data-level parallelism and accelerate the frame rate up to four times. "It's strictly the ability to process more data and to process it simultaneously in a single thread," Terlson said.
He added that Observables may be introduced in 2016’s ES7 or the next versions in the next two years or after. “Observables really help lay the foundation for a new syntax,” he said. Exponentiation operator capability, PadLeft and padRight, Value types, class property declarations and decorators are all part of the future plan for ES7.
During his presentation, Terlson also mentioned that JavaScript types is ‘an active area of investigation,’ but according to him it is ‘a very hard problem.’ "The benefit of building it in is runtimes could then use it for performance advantages,’ he added. According to him, JavaScript types might take at least 5 years to be taken into consideration and in the meantime, a similar solution to TypeScript could be implemented.