JavaScript is a language which started off in 1995 with limited functionalities. It was written by Brendan Eich in 10 days while working with Netscape. Brendan Eich created an engine called SpiderMonkey which was being used by Netscape. Eich open sourced the SpiderMonkey engine and today it is the foundation of Mozilla Firefox.
JavaScript is a scripting language, anyone can write an engine which can parse JavaScript code and transpile it to machine code. The problem was that almost every big fish in the browser market was writing their own engines which were not uniform. That is where ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association) came for a rescue.
ECMA Documented a standard which is known as ECMAScript, based on which the modern JavaScript and it’s engines are built. The most popular one in current time is V8 engine which was created by Google back in 2008 for their Chrome browser.
In the mid 2000s Google created Google Maps which made heavy use of AJAX, mouse actions and it was a lot more intuitive and user friendly than Yahoo maps. Despite Google Maps being a good product, the performance or speed was a concern, that was the time when Mr. Sundar Pichai pitched for Google’s own JavaScript engine, which would lead to Google’s own browser – Chrome.
JavaScript kept evolving with time. In 2015, ECMA released a major version – ECMAscript 2015 which changed the course of JavaScript’s future. With introduction of NodeJS by Ryan Dahl, JavaScript was not limited to browsers which gave it unprecedented growth in almost all platform which were using V8 engine in one way or another. It was mostly because of NodeJS, JavaScript spread across Mobile app development, server side, Internet of Things and what not.
With extremely heavy adaption and continuous improvement by ECMA year by year, our beloved JavaScript is not going anywhere anytime soon.