ECMAScript® 2022 Language Specification - Standard ECMA-262

This Ecma Standard defines the ECMAScript 2022 Language. It is the thirteenth 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. 

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.