Comparison between ES5 and ES6
ECMAScript is a trademarked scripting language specification that is defined by ECMA International. It was created to standardize JavaScript. The ES scripting language has many implementations, and the popular one is JavaScript. Generally, ECMAScript is used for client-side scripting of the World Wide Web.
ES5 is an abbreviation of ECMAScript 5 and also known as ECMAScript 2009. The sixth edition of the ECMAScript standard is ES6 or ECMAScript 6. It is also known as ECMAScript 2015. ES6 is a major enhancement in the JavaScript language that allows us to write programs for complex applications.
Although ES5 and ES6 have some similarities in their nature, there are also so many differences between them.
Let us see some of the differences between ES5 and ES6. The comparison between ES5 and ES6 are tabulated as follows:
Difference between ES5 and ES6
| Based on | ES5 | ES6 |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | ES5 is the fifth edition of the ECMAScript (a trademarked scripting language specification defined by ECMA International) | ES6 is the sixth edition of the ECMAScript (a trademarked scripting language specification defined by ECMA International). |
| Release | It was introduced in 2009. | It was introduced in 2015. |
| Data-types | ES5 supports primitive data types that are string, number, boolean, null, and undefined. | In ES6, there are some additions to JavaScript data types. It introduced a new primitive data type ‘symbol’ for supporting unique values. |
| Defining Variables | In ES5, we could only define the variables by using the var keyword. | In ES6, there are two new ways to define variables that are let and const. |
| Performance | As ES5 is prior to ES6, there is a non-presence of some features, so it has a lower performance than ES6. | Because of new features and the shorthand storage implementation ES6 has a higher performance than ES5. |
| Support | A wide range of communities supports it. | It also has a lot of community support, but it is lesser than ES5. |
| Object Manipulation | ES5 is time-consuming than ES6. | Due to destructuring and speed operators, object manipulation can be processed more smoothly in ES6. |
| Arrow Functions | In ES5, both function and return keywords are used to define a function. | An arrow function is a new feature introduced in ES6 by which we don’t require the function keyword to define the function. |
| Loops | In ES5, there is a use of for loop to iterate over elements. | ES6 introduced the concept of for…of loop to perform an iteration over the values of the iterable objects. |
Transpilation
As of now, there are no browsers that fully support the ES6 features; however, we can convert the ES6 code to the ES5 code by using the transpilation.
There are two major compilers Babel and Traceur, which are used to convert the ES6 code to ES5 code as part of the build process.
Spread Operator (…)
It is introduced in ES6, which makes it easy to merge arrays and objects.
Template Literal (`)
It is a new feature introduced in ES6 that allows us to work with strings. Template literals allow us to perform string interpolation easily.