Today we’re announcing an important change in the work of products for creating reports and Stimulsoft data analytics for JavaScript.
Starting from the next version – 2022.3 – Reports.JS and Dashboards.JS products are transiting a new language standard – ECMAScript 2017. Now we’re going to tell you about this new feature in detail.
Starting from the next version – 2022.3 – Reports.JS and Dashboards.JS products are transiting a new language standard – ECMAScript 2017. Now we’re going to tell you about this new feature in detail.
A bit of history
Before telling you about the peculiarities of the work of our products under the new standard, let's take a brief look at the history of the issue. ECMA International is an IT standardization organization. This way, ECMAScript is a standard for scripting languages, the most popular implementation of which is JavaScript. The first such standard appeared in 1997, having received an ordinal number 1 - ECMAScript1 or simply ES1. Recently, the standard has been updated annually, and instead of a serial number, it gets the year of release to the name, for example, ES2020.Advantages of using ECMAScript 2017
The key reason for the transition of Stimulsoft products for JavaScript to a newer version of the standard is the native implementation of the Async/Await construct in ES2017. Asynchronous functions improve not only the design and readability of the code but, more importantly, significantly speed up the execution of the necessary operations. This is due to implementing asynchronous functions directly inside the engine, which avoids transpilation operations into another construct.Also, the transition to the ES2017 standard reduces the number of conversions when transpiling the code into older versions of the language standard, which reduces the volume of the resulting code and makes it faster.
We tested the work of the report generator under the new version, and according to their result, the rendering of a multipage report increased by more than 25%, which makes the work of Stimulsoft products more effective.
Transition of Stimulsoft products to ES2017
For the past few years, Stimulsoft Reports.JS and Dashboards.JS products have been using the ECMAScript 2015 or ES6 standard. In the next version, 2022.3, the transition to the ES2017 standard will occur.Here’s a table of compatibility of the ECMAScript standard with versions of popular browsers:
 |  |  |  |  |  | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES5 | 23 | 6 | 21 | 15 | 12 | 9 |
| ES2015 (ES6) | 51 | 10 | 52 | 38 | 12 | 11 |
| ES2017 (ES8) | 55 | 11 | 54 | 42 | 15 | - |
Thus, the ECMAScript 2017 standard has been supported by basic browsers for more than five years. The transition of our products to the new version of the standard will not influence the work of your projects.
New features in ES2017 remove barriers to our product development and allow us to keep up with the times.
If you have any questions, please contact us.