Recapping the July 2015 TC39 Committee meeting in Redmond

For most of Microsoft, the end of July means the excitement of our //OneWeek celebration and welcoming tens of millions of new users to Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge! Some who follow JavaScript closely are excited for another reason – the July TC39 meeting in Redmond. ECMA’s TC39 is the committee responsible for developing the JavaScript language – officially called ECMAScript – and since times immemorial (c. 2008) the committee descends on Redmond during the warm summer months to hash out contentious language design issues (and enjoy some high-quality campus cafeteria food).

A few proposals were advanced to later stages of the new agile TC39 process, signaling a great amount of progress by the committee and feature champions. Notably, the Array.prototype.includes and the exponentiation operator were advanced to “Candidate” status (signaling the proposal is ready for implementations to gather further feedback), and Async Functions advanced to “Draft” status (formalizing the proposal in a precise specification). Additionally we discussed and resolved a number of technical issues in both ES6 (adding a few more errata to the list) and the upcoming ES2016.

Another outcome of this meeting is that Allen Wirfs-Brock, the long-time editor of the ECMAScript specification, has stepped down as editor. We would like to extend our thanks to Allen for his innumerable contributions over the last several years. I’m honored to have been elected, and look forward to working closely with TC39 and the rest of the community on making the next versions of ECMAScript even more awesome!

Stay cool out there, and don’t forget your semicolons!

― Brian Terlson, Senior Program Manager, Chakra Team