[bakkoting]

> That's why each change to the spec results in a new version. It's a self-fork of the previous spec.

That's not how it works, no. There is just the spec [1], which is updated frequently. I am editor of the specification. (There are annual editions as well, but no one should pay attention to these.)

> I'm sure they'd add in support for freezing protoype chains, even if just as an option that can be toggled, but i doubt they'd ever want to break the spec just because they don't like parts of it.

Well, like I said, if Deno's only concern is breaking with the spec here, I expect the spec could be updated to allow this behavior.

[1] https://tc39.es/ecma262/

[joshAg]

>>> It is the fourteenth edition of the ECMAScript Language Specification

Fine, then sed s/version/edition/g

From the point of view of a maintainer that makes sense, but for the users each annual edition or feature moving into stage 4 its own spec version, and unless the feature is absolutely groundbreaking, thinking in terms of annual editions makes it possible for users to grab various tools with confidence that things will work together smoothly.

Look at how Mozilla interacts with the spec [1]. They're not thinking in terms of the nightly version of the spec. They're looking at the annualized editions and making sure they support them as fully as possible. And then they communicate that support to their own users in terms of that annualized edition.

V8 consumes from nightly and using the up-to-date test suites and they explain their reasoning here[2], but notably they're still conceptualizing things to their users through the lens of annualized editions even though they're still grabbing features when they're only at stage 3. They even tag blog posts about js with tags for the annualized editions that added the feature: [3].

As a user of the users of the spec, the annualized editions are super super helpful. I can only use features that have actually been implemented. And I have to make sure that each tool I use is only getting code that uses features it's implemented. Can you imagine if every tool had feature-by-feature implementation matrices? "OK, ESlint understands new features A, B and D, but babel only implements B, C, and D, but library X doesn't support feature D yet, so since we want to use that we have to use bluebird instead of the native feature D for now" and on an on. It'd be madness, and we'd end up picking a handful of tools we like enough and then transpiling everything to es5 because our own users don't actually care if we transpiled down to es5 or shaved enough yaks that we realized that our toolchain natively supports featurs B but everything else must be transpiled out or replacing the native implementations with our our in code implementation. Instead each tool picks an annualized edition and while slower tool release cycles be annoying, I can actually turn that guarantee of standardized features into a toolchain with transpilation steps as necessary, which means as a dev I know i can safely use any feature in that annualized edition without worrying if this feature i haven't really used before is going to blow up somewhere in my toolchain because the implementer hasn't gotten around to implementing that feature yet.

So while I like looking at the draft proposals and consider it important to know how the language is evolving, I have to wait for implementations to permeate enough of my tools before I can use the shiny new feature, which means annualized editions of the spec.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2017/02/22/ecmascript-20... [2]: https://v8.dev/blog/modern-javascript [3]: https://v8.dev/features/tags/ecmascript

[bakkoting]

Mozilla is absolutely thinking in terms of the nightly version of the spec. I agree that public messaging sometimes talks about annual editions, but this is mostly because it's a convenient way to talk about when features were added to the language, not because it reflects any underlying reality.

Anyway, that's not really the relevant thing. What I'm addressing is:

> deno has done is removed native support for older js specs and instead makes you transpile to an earlier spec. And by removing support for the earlier specs, they are able to drop support for deprecated features.

And that's just not a thing. That has no relationship to the ES specification works. The __proto__ accessor was never mandatory; it was added in browsers a long time before it was specified, and then specified as optional (Annex B) when it was first added to the specification, and has been optional since then. This is true whether or not you think of there being a single specification or annual editions.

So, with that said, to address the specific topic of annual editions:

> "OK, ESlint understands new features A, B and D, but babel only implements B, C, and D, but library X doesn't support feature D yet, so since we want to use that we have to use bluebird instead of the native feature D for now" and on an on.

That's exactly how it works. eslint implements proposals at stage 4. Babel implements proposals as they come out and people contribute, but only adds them to preset-env at stage 3. The output for present-env is based on what's actually supported in the browsers you're using. They both take a variable amount of time to land features once they hit the appropriate stage. Neither of them gates anything on annual editions. Neither do browsers. And browsers will frequently not have implemented features from multiple editions ago; for example, regex lookbehind was added in ES2018 and is still not implemented in Safari.