proposal-relative-indexing-method VS proposal-decimal

If you want to learn more, check out the MDN reference for it. You can also read the original proposal for it.

Just like every other array method, it’s type coerced. It’s a problem with all built ins, best not fracture this more in JS without a very good reason. https://github.com/tc39/proposal-relative-indexing-method/issues/40

.at()

.at() .at() method on all the built-in indexables.

For a proposal to be finalized, it needs "Two compatible implementations which pass the acceptance tests" (source). This can mean browsers but also includes transpilers like babel. Chrome - which also includes other browsers now like Edge and Opera - will often release stage 3 features publicly before finalized, and Firefox isn't usually far behind, or sometimes even first, as was the case with the currently stage 3 at() method for arrays. Safari is probably the one you have to worry about the most. They tend to be further behind, I think mostly due to their release cadence being longer. Safari, for example, doesn't yet support private methods whereas the other browsers have supported them for some time now. While private methods are stage 4, they are expected to be part of ES2022 which hasn't been published yet - the current being ES2021.

Soon we’ll get this nicer version (proposal):

Proposal hosted on GitHub explains the reasoning behind it https://github.com/tc39/proposal-relative-indexing-method

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-relative-indexing-method#rationale

Bloomberg are currently sponsoring Igalia to work on adding native Decimal number support to JavaScript.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decimal

This is an active proposal and was last discussed in the September 2023 meeting.

would it be possible, for example, to access the standard decimal library of C# or Python via Javascript, thus not having to wait for the TC39 spec / implementation? [1]

[1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decimal

There's a BigDecimal TC39 proposal to bring this kind of thing to the native language, but until then you have to choose between accuracy and performance.

To solve the problem while JavaScript waits on its own BigDecimal API, you can use something like bignumber.js to perform your calculations.

TC39 is now advancing Built-in decimal datatype in JavaScript.

given the popularity of javascript, it's about time we had better native tools for dealing with numbers in general, but it seems like the discussion is very slow on this front. for instance, the decimal proposal is still at stage 1 [1]. and no, BigInt does not solve that.

[1] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decimal

In the future, JavaScript will hopefully get base 10 arithmetic: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decimal