ES2019: What’s new in ECMAScript, the JavaScript specification standard

Every year a new edition of the ECMAScript (ES) scripting-language specification standard comes out. This year it is its tenth edition, also known as ES2019 or ES10. The feature set of ES2019 got finalized earlier this year and was published last month.

Some of the exciting features this specification brings are Object.fromEntries(), trimStart(), trimEnd(), flat(), flatMap(), description property for symbol objects, optional catch binding, and more. These features have also landed in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome for developers to try out.

Let’s take a look at some of the features in ES2019:

Object.fromEntries()

In JavaScript, you can easily convert objects into arrays with the Object.entries() method that was introduced in the ES2017 standard. ES2019 introduces the Object.fromEntries() method that enables you to do exactly the opposite. Similar to the dict() function in Python, this method allows you to transform a list of key-value pairs into an object.

Array.prototype.flat() and Array.prototype.flatMap()

The method Array.prototype.flatten() was renamed to Array.prototype.flat() method in ES2019 after last year it ended up breaking MooTools' implementation of it. It recursively flattens an array up to the specified depth, which defaults to 1. The second method, ‘Array.prototype.flatMap’ performs the mapping of each element and then flattens the result into a new array.

trimStart() and trimEnd()

The purpose of the new trimStart() and trimEnd() methods proposed in ES2019 is same as the trimLeft() and trimRight() methods. While trimStart() is used to remove whitespace from the beginning of a string, trimEnd() is used to remove whitespace characters from the end of a string. These are introduced to maintain consistency with the padStart/padEnd the standard functions. To maintain web compatibility trimLeft() and trimRight() will be their aliases.

Optional catch binding

In JavaScript, it is mandatory to specify the catch() parameter when using try...catch, no matter whether you use it or not. However, there are a few use cases where you wouldn’t want to use the parameter or catch binding. Axel Rauschmayer, the author of JavaScript for impatient programmers (ES1–ES2019), lists the following two:

If you want to completely ignore the error.

You don’t care about the error or you already know what it will be, but you do want to react to it.

This new proposal allows you to completely omit the unused catch binding without any syntax errors.

Function.toString()

Earlier, when you called the toString() method on a function it used to strip all the whitespaces, newlines, and comments from the source code. Now, it will return the function source code exactly as it was defined.

Description property for Symbol objects

ES2019 introduces a new read-only ‘description’ property for Symbol objects. You can add it to a Symbol object to return a string containing its description for debugging purposes.

Well-formed JSON.stringify()

According to a JSON RFC, JSON text when shared “outside the scope of a closed ecosystem” should be encoded using UTF-8. However, JSON.Stringify() can sometimes return strings and code points, particularly, the surrogate range (U+D800—U+DFFF), that cannot be represented in UTF-8. This ES2019 proposal prevents JSON.stringify() from returning such ill-formed Unicode strings.

Many developers are excited about these new ES2019 proposals. A user on Hacker News commented, “That array.flat() and array.flatMap() stuff is great to see. Always having to rely on lodash and friends to do that type of work. Exciting to see how JS is evolving.” Another user added, “Object.fromEntries will be super useful, surprised it’s taken this long to become a native feature.” Others are waiting for the pattern matching and optional chaining proposals to reach the stage 4 of TC39 process, “Now if we could just get pattern matching and optional chaining, that would really elevate things.”

These were some of the features introduced in ES2019. To know more, check out the specification published on the ECMA International website.

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