Draft ECMA-262 / December 10, 2025

ECMAScript® 2026 Language Specification

About this Specification

The document at https://tc39.es/ecma262/ is the most accurate and up-to-date ECMAScript specification. It contains the content of the most recent yearly snapshot plus any finished proposals (those that have reached Stage 4 in the proposal process and thus are implemented in several implementations and will be in the next practical revision) since that snapshot was taken.

This document is available as a single page and as multiple pages.

Contributing to this Specification

This specification is developed on GitHub with the help of the ECMAScript community. There are a number of ways to contribute to the development of this specification:

Refer to the colophon for more information on how this document is created.

Introduction

This Ecma Standard defines the ECMAScript 2026 Language. It is the seventeenth edition of the ECMAScript Language Specification. Since publication of the first edition in 1997, ECMAScript has grown to be one of the world's most widely used general-purpose programming languages. It is best known as the language embedded in web browsers but has also been widely adopted for server and embedded applications.

ECMAScript is based on several originating technologies, the most well-known being JavaScript (Netscape) and JScript (Microsoft). The language was invented by Brendan Eich at Netscape and first appeared in that company's Navigator 2.0 browser. It has appeared in all subsequent browsers from Netscape and in all browsers from Microsoft starting with Internet Explorer 3.0.

The development of the ECMAScript Language Specification started in November 1996. The first edition of this Ecma Standard was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly of June 1997.

That Ecma Standard was submitted to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for adoption under the fast-track procedure, and approved as international standard ISO/IEC 16262, in April 1998. The Ecma General Assembly of June 1998 approved the second edition of ECMA-262 to keep it fully aligned with ISO/IEC 16262. Changes between the first and the second edition are editorial in nature.

The third edition of the Standard introduced powerful regular expressions, better string handling, new control statements, try/catch exception handling, tighter definition of errors, formatting for numeric output and minor changes in anticipation of future language growth. The third edition of the ECMAScript standard was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly of December 1999 and published as ISO/IEC 16262:2002 in June 2002.

After publication of the third edition, ECMAScript achieved massive adoption in conjunction with the World Wide Web where it has become the programming language that is supported by essentially all web browsers. Significant work was done to develop a fourth edition of ECMAScript. However, that work was not completed and not published as the fourth edition of ECMAScript but some of it was incorporated into the development of the sixth edition.

The fifth edition of ECMAScript (published as ECMA-262 5th edition) codified de facto interpretations of the language specification that have become common among browser implementations and added support for new features that had emerged since the publication of the third edition. Such features include accessor properties, reflective creation and inspection of objects, program control of property attributes, additional array manipulation functions, support for the JSON object encoding format, and a strict mode that provides enhanced error checking and program security. The fifth edition was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly of December 2009.

The fifth edition was submitted to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for adoption under the fast-track procedure, and approved as international standard ISO/IEC 16262:2011. Edition 5.1 of the ECMAScript Standard incorporated minor corrections and is the same text as ISO/IEC 16262:2011. The 5.1 Edition was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly of June 2011.

Focused development of the sixth edition started in 2009, as the fifth edition was being prepared for publication. However, this was preceded by significant experimentation and language enhancement design efforts dating to the publication of the third edition in 1999. In a very real sense, the completion of the sixth edition is the culmination of a fifteen year effort. The goals for this edition included providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements included modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls. The ECMAScript library of built-ins was expanded to support additional data abstractions including maps, sets, and arrays of binary numeric values as well as additional support for Unicode supplementary characters in strings and regular expressions. The built-ins were also made extensible via subclassing. The sixth edition provides the foundation for regular, incremental language and library enhancements. The sixth edition was adopted by the General Assembly of June 2015.

ECMAScript 2016 was the first ECMAScript edition released under Ecma TC39's new yearly release cadence and open development process. A plain-text source document was built from the ECMAScript 2015 source document to serve as the base for further development entirely on GitHub. Over the year of this standard's development, hundreds of pull requests and issues were filed representing thousands of bug fixes, editorial fixes and other improvements. Additionally, numerous software tools were developed to aid in this effort including Ecmarkup, Ecmarkdown, and Grammarkdown. ES2016 also included support for a new exponentiation operator and adds a new method to Array.prototype called includes.

ECMAScript 2017 introduced Async Functions, Shared Memory, and Atomics along with smaller language and library enhancements, bug fixes, and editorial updates. Async functions improve the asynchronous programming experience by providing syntax for promise-returning functions. Shared Memory and Atomics introduce a new memory model that allows multi-agent programs to communicate using atomic operations that ensure a well-defined execution order even on parallel CPUs. It also included new static methods on Object: Object.values, Object.entries, and Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors.

ECMAScript 2018 introduced support for asynchronous iteration via the async iterator protocol and async generators. It also included four new regular expression features: the dotAll flag, named capture groups, Unicode property escapes, and look-behind assertions. Lastly it included object rest and spread properties.

ECMAScript 2019 introduced a few new built-in functions: flat and flatMap on Array.prototype for flattening arrays, Object.fromEntries for directly turning the return value of Object.entries into a new Object, and trimStart and trimEnd on String.prototype as better-named alternatives to the widely implemented but non-standard String.prototype.trimLeft and trimRight built-ins. In addition, it included a few minor updates to syntax and semantics. Updated syntax included optional catch binding parameters and allowing U+2028 (LINE SEPARATOR) and U+2029 (PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR) in string literals to align with JSON. Other updates included requiring that Array.prototype.sort be a stable sort, requiring that JSON.stringify return well-formed UTF-8 regardless of input, and clarifying Function.prototype.toString by requiring that it either return the corresponding original source text or a standard placeholder.

ECMAScript 2020, the 11th edition, introduced the matchAll method for Strings, to produce an iterator for all match objects generated by a global regular expression; import(), a syntax to asynchronously import Modules with a dynamic specifier; BigInt, a new number primitive for working with arbitrary precision integers; Promise.allSettled, a new Promise combinator that does not short-circuit; globalThis, a universal way to access the global this value; dedicated export * as ns from 'module' syntax for use within modules; increased standardization of for-in enumeration order; import.meta, a host-populated object available in Modules that may contain contextual information about the Module; as well as adding two new syntax features to improve working with “nullish” values (undefined or null): nullish coalescing, a value selection operator; and optional chaining, a property access and function invocation operator that short-circuits if the value to access/invoke is nullish.

ECMAScript 2021, the 12th edition, introduced the replaceAll method for Strings; Promise.any, a Promise combinator that short-circuits when an input value is fulfilled; AggregateError, a new Error type to represent multiple errors at once; logical assignment operators (??=, &&=, ||=); WeakRef, for referring to a target object without preserving it from garbage collection, and FinalizationRegistry, to manage registration and unregistration of cleanup operations performed when target objects are garbage collected; separators for numeric literals (1_000); and Array.prototype.sort was made more precise, reducing the amount of cases that result in an implementation-defined sort order.

ECMAScript 2022, the 13th edition, introduced top-level await, allowing the keyword to be used at the top level of modules; new class elements: public and private instance fields, public and private static fields, private instance methods and accessors, and private static methods and accessors; static blocks inside classes, to perform per-class evaluation initialization; the #x in obj syntax, to test for presence of private fields on objects; regular expression match indices via the /d flag, which provides start and end indices for matched substrings; the cause property on Error objects, which can be used to record a causation chain in errors; the at method for Strings, Arrays, and TypedArrays, which allows relative indexing; and Object.hasOwn, a convenient alternative to Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.

ECMAScript 2023, the 14th edition, introduced the toSorted, toReversed, with, findLast, and findLastIndex methods on Array.prototype and TypedArray.prototype, as well as the toSpliced method on Array.prototype; added support for #! comments at the beginning of files to better facilitate executable ECMAScript files; and allowed the use of most Symbols as keys in weak collections.

ECMAScript 2024, the 15th edition, added facilities for resizing and transferring ArrayBuffers and SharedArrayBuffers; added a new RegExp /v flag for creating RegExps with more advanced features for working with sets of strings; and introduced the Promise.withResolvers convenience method for constructing Promises, the Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy methods for aggregating data, the Atomics.waitAsync method for asynchronously waiting for a change to shared memory, and the String.prototype.isWellFormed and String.prototype.toWellFormed methods for checking and ensuring that strings contain only well-formed Unicode.

ECMAScript 2025, the 16th edition, added a new Iterator global with associated static and prototype methods for working with iterators; added methods to Set.prototype for performing common operations on Sets; added support for importing JSON modules as well as syntax for declaring attributes of imported modules; added the RegExp.escape method for escaping a string to be safely used in a regular expression; added syntax for enabling and disabling modifier flags inline within regular expressions; added the Promise.try method for calling functions which may or may not return a Promise and ensuring the result is always a Promise; and added a new Float16Array TypedArray kind as well as the related DataView.prototype.getFloat16, DataView.prototype.setFloat16, and Math.f16round methods.

Dozens of individuals representing many organizations have made very significant contributions within Ecma TC39 to the development of this edition and to the prior editions. In addition, a vibrant community has emerged supporting TC39's ECMAScript efforts. This community has reviewed numerous drafts, filed thousands of bug reports, performed implementation experiments, contributed test suites, and educated the world-wide developer community about ECMAScript. Unfortunately, it is impossible to identify and acknowledge every person and organization who has contributed to this effort.

Allen Wirfs-Brock
ECMA-262, Project Editor, 6th Edition

Brian Terlson
ECMA-262, Project Editor, 7th through 10th Editions

Jordan Harband
ECMA-262, Project Editor, 10th through 12th Editions

Shu-yu Guo
ECMA-262, Project Editor, 12th through 16th Editions

Michael Ficarra
ECMA-262, Project Editor, 12th through 16th Editions

Kevin Gibbons
ECMA-262, Project Editor, 12th through 16th Editions

1 Scope

This Standard defines the ECMAScript 2026 general-purpose programming language.

2 Conformance

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript must provide and support all the types, values, objects, properties, functions, and program syntax and semantics described in this specification.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript must interpret source text input in conformance with the latest version of the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript that provides an application programming interface (API) that supports programs that need to adapt to the linguistic and cultural conventions used by different human languages and countries must implement the interface defined by the most recent edition of ECMA-402 that is compatible with this specification.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript may provide additional types, values, objects, properties, and functions beyond those described in this specification. In particular, a conforming implementation of ECMAScript may provide properties not described in this specification, and values for those properties, for objects that are described in this specification.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript may support program and regular expression syntax not described in this specification. In particular, a conforming implementation of ECMAScript may support program syntax that makes use of any “future reserved words” noted in subclause 12.7.2 of this specification.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript must not implement any extension that is listed as a Forbidden Extension in subclause 17.1.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript must not redefine any facilities that are not implementation-defined, implementation-approximated, or host-defined.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript may choose to implement or not implement Normative Optional subclauses, unless otherwise indicated. Web browsers are generally required to implement all normative optional subclauses. (See Annex B.) If any Normative Optional behaviour is implemented, all of the behaviour in the containing Normative Optional clause must be implemented. A Normative Optional clause is denoted in this specification with the words "Normative Optional" in a coloured box, as shown below.

Normative Optional

2.1 Example Normative Optional Clause Heading

Example clause contents.

A conforming implementation of ECMAScript must implement Legacy subclauses, unless they are also marked as Normative Optional. All of the language features and behaviours specified within Legacy subclauses have one or more undesirable characteristics. However, their continued usage in existing applications prevents their removal from this specification. These features are not considered part of the core ECMAScript language. Programmers should not use or assume the existence of these features and behaviours when writing new ECMAScript code.

Legacy

2.2 Example Legacy Clause Heading

Example clause contents.
Normative Optional, Legacy

2.3 Example Legacy Normative Optional Clause Heading

Example clause contents.

3 Normative References

The following referenced documents are indispensable for the application of this document. For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including any amendments) applies.

IEEE 754-2019, IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic.

The Unicode Standard.
https://unicode.org/versions/latest

ISO/IEC 10646, Information Technology — Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) plus Amendment 1:2005, Amendment 2:2006, Amendment 3:2008, Amendment 4:2008, and additional amendments and corrigenda, or successor.

ECMA-402, ECMAScript Internationalization API Specification, specifically the annual edition corresponding to this edition of this specification.
https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-402/

ECMA-404, The JSON Data Interchange Format.
https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-404/

4 Overview

This section contains a non-normative overview of the ECMAScript language.

ECMAScript is an object-oriented programming language for performing computations and manipulating computational objects within a host environment. ECMAScript as defined here is not intended to be computationally self-sufficient; indeed, there are no provisions in this specification for input of external data or output of computed results. Instead, it is expected that the computational environment of an ECMAScript program will provide not only the objects and other facilities described in this specification but also certain environment-specific objects, whose description and behaviour are beyond the scope of this specification except to indicate that they may provide certain properties that can be accessed and certain functions that can be called from an ECMAScript program.

ECMAScript was originally designed to be used as a scripting language, but has become widely used as a general-purpose programming language. A scripting language is a programming language that is used to manipulate, customize, and automate the facilities of an existing system. In such systems, useful functionality is already available through a user interface, and the scripting language is a mechanism for exposing that functionality to program control. In this way, the existing system is said to provide a host environment of objects and facilities, which completes the capabilities of the scripting language. A scripting language is intended for use by both professional and non-professional programmers.

ECMAScript was originally designed to be a Web scripting language, providing a mechanism to enliven Web pages in browsers and to perform server computation as part of a Web-based client-server architecture. ECMAScript is now used to provide core scripting capabilities for a variety of host environments. Therefore the core language is specified in this document apart from any particular host environment.

ECMAScript usage has moved beyond simple scripting and it is now used for the full spectrum of programming tasks in many different environments and scales. As the usage of ECMAScript has expanded, so have the features and facilities it provides. ECMAScript is now a fully featured general-purpose programming language.

4.1 Web Scripting

A web browser provides an ECMAScript host environment for client-side computation including, for instance, objects that represent windows, menus, pop-ups, dialog boxes, text areas, anchors, frames, history, cookies, and input/output. Further, the host environment provides a means to attach scripting code to events such as change of focus, page and image loading, unloading, error and abort, selection, form submission, and mouse actions. Scripting code appears within the HTML and the displayed page is a combination of user interface elements and fixed and computed text and images. The scripting code is reactive to user interaction, and there is no need for a main program.

A web server provides a different host environment for server-side computation including objects representing requests, clients, and files; and mechanisms to lock and share data. By using browser-side and server-side scripting together, it is possible to distribute computation between the client and server while providing a customized user interface for a Web-based application.

Each Web browser and server that supports ECMAScript supplies its own host environment, completing the ECMAScript execution environment.

4.2 Hosts and Implementations

To aid integrating ECMAScript into host environments, this specification defers the definition of certain facilities (e.g., abstract operations), either in whole or in part, to a source outside of this specification. Editorially, this specification distinguishes the following kinds of deferrals.

An implementation is an external source that further defines facilities enumerated in Annex D or those that are marked as implementation-defined or implementation-approximated. In informal use, an implementation refers to a concrete artefact, such as a particular web browser.

An implementation-defined facility is one that defers its definition to an external source without further qualification. This specification does not make any recommendations for particular behaviours, and conforming implementations are free to choose any behaviour within the constraints put forth by this specification.

An implementation-approximated facility is one that defers its definition to an external source while recommending an ideal behaviour. While conforming implementations are free to choose any behaviour within the constraints put forth by this specification, they are encouraged to strive to approximate the ideal. Some mathematical operations, such as Math.exp, are implementation-approximated.

A host is an external source that further defines facilities listed in Annex D but does not further define other implementation-defined or implementation-approximated facilities. In informal use, a host refers to the set of all implementations, such as the set of all web browsers, that interface with this specification in the same way via Annex D. A host is often an external specification, such as WHATWG HTML (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/). In other words, facilities that are host-defined are often further defined in external specifications.

A host hook is an abstract operation that is defined in whole or in part by an external source. All host hooks must be listed in Annex D. A host hook must conform to at least the following requirements:

A host-defined facility is one that defers its definition to an external source without further qualification and is listed in Annex D. Implementations that are not hosts may also provide definitions for host-defined facilities.

A host environment is a particular choice of definition for all host-defined facilities. A host environment typically includes objects or functions which allow obtaining input and providing output as host-defined properties of the global object.

This specification follows the editorial convention of always using the most specific term. For example, if a facility is host-defined, it should not be referred to as implementation-defined.

Both hosts and implementations may interface with this specification via the language types, specification types, abstract operations, grammar productions, intrinsic objects, and intrinsic symbols defined herein.

4.3 ECMAScript Overview

The following is an informal overview of ECMAScript—not all parts of the language are described. This overview is not part of the standard proper.

ECMAScript is object-based: basic language and host facilities are provided by objects, and an ECMAScript program is a cluster of communicating objects. In ECMAScript, an object is a collection of zero or more properties each with attributes that determine how each property can be used—for example, when the Writable attribute for a property is set to false, any attempt by executed ECMAScript code to assign a different value to the property fails. Properties are containers that hold other objects, primitive values, or functions. A primitive value is a member of one of the following built-in types: Undefined, Null, Boolean, Number, BigInt, String, and Symbol; an object is a member of the built-in type Object; and a function is a callable object. A function that is associated with an object via a property is called a method.

ECMAScript defines a collection of built-in objects that round out the definition of ECMAScript entities. These built-in objects include the global object; objects that are fundamental to the runtime semantics of the language including Object, Function, Boolean, Symbol, and various Error objects; objects that represent and manipulate numeric values including Math, Number, and Date; the text processing objects String and RegExp; objects that are indexed collections of values including Array and nine different kinds of Typed Arrays whose elements all have a specific numeric data representation; keyed collections including Map and Set objects; objects supporting structured data including the JSON object, ArrayBuffer, SharedArrayBuffer, and DataView; objects supporting control abstractions including generator functions and Promise objects; and reflection objects including Proxy and Reflect.

ECMAScript also defines a set of built-in operators. ECMAScript operators include various unary operations, multiplicative operators, additive operators, bitwise shift operators, relational operators, equality operators, binary bitwise operators, binary logical operators, assignment operators, and the comma operator.

Large ECMAScript programs are supported by modules which allow a program to be divided into multiple sequences of statements and declarations. Each module explicitly identifies declarations it uses that need to be provided by other modules and which of its declarations are available for use by other modules.

ECMAScript syntax intentionally resembles Java syntax. ECMAScript syntax is relaxed to enable it to serve as an easy-to-use scripting language. For example, a variable is not required to have its type declared nor are types associated with properties, and defined functions are not required to have their declarations appear textually before calls to them.

4.3.1 Objects

Even though ECMAScript includes syntax for class definitions, ECMAScript objects are not fundamentally class-based such as those in C++, Smalltalk, or Java. Instead objects may be created in various ways including via a literal notation or via constructors which create objects and then execute code that initializes all or part of them by assigning initial values to their properties. Each constructor is a function that has a property named "prototype" that is used to implement prototype-based inheritance and shared properties. Objects are created by using constructors in new expressions; for example, new Date(2009, 11) creates a new Date object. Invoking a constructor without using new has consequences that depend on the