Our company ported moderate chunks of business logic to JavaScript. We compile the code with a minifier, which further improves performance. Since the language is dynamically typed, it lends itself well to obfuscation, which occurs as a byproduct of minification. We went to great efforts to ensure it positively screams, performance-wise. We can now do what we did before, faster, better, with less code, on more platforms. In summary, we are very satisfied with the current state of the language.
I personally love the language especially for its cross-platform nature. So naturally, I read up a lot about the state of JavaScript compilers, performance and compatibility across as many browsers and platforms as I have time to research.
The one theme which has been growing louder and louder these days, is the news about ECMAScript 6. So far, what I have been able to gather is that ES6 promises a better development experience; firstly by enabling new ways to do things, secondly by reporting errors early. This sounds great for those who are still waiting for the language to meet their needs before jumping on board.
But we have already jumped on board in a big way. Sure, I expect that we will have to do ongoing maintenance and feature revisions on our code through the years, and that we would obviously make use of best practices at the time. But I don't see us refactoring major portions of it to take advantage of language features that are mostly intended to boost developer productivity.
I keep wondering, what impact will the language advances ultimately have on our existing, well-written, well-performing code base? Is there something I am missing? Is there something we ought to look out for? Does anyone have tips or guidance on how we should approach the ecmascript.next finalization? Should we care?
