The TC39 Graveyard: Proposals That Died So JavaScript Could Live

JavaScript has shipped hundreds of features. This talk is about the ones it buried.

• Object.observe made it all the way into Chrome and then got ripped back out.
• SIMD.js had Intel engineers, browser prototypes and a spec, and WebAssembly killed it anyway.
• Array.prototype.flatten broke a single library from 2007, the internet spent a week arguing about renaming it to smoosh, and that's why we all write flat() today.
• The pipeline operator has outlived two rewrites of itself and is still stuck at stage 2.

In this Lightning talk I'll walk through these stories and the pattern behind them. I want to highlight the idea that proposals almost never die because the idea was bad. They die over memory layouts, one old library, a single delegate's no, or because something else got there first.

And everyone will know that the best part is that nothing in this graveyard died for nothing. Every grave points at the better thing that took its place.