JavaScript

JavaScript
Screenshot of JavaScript source code
ParadigmsMulti-paradigm: event-driven, functional, imperative, procedural, object-oriented
FamilyECMAScript
Designed byBrendan Eich of Netscape first; then others contributed to ECMAScript standard
First appeared4 December 1995 (1995-12-04)
Stable release
ECMAScript 2024  / June 2024 (June 2024)
Preview release
ECMAScript 2025  / 27 March 2024 (27 March 2024)
Typing disciplineDynamic, weak, duck
Memory managementGarbage collected
Scopelexical
Filename extensions.js.mjs.cjs
Websiteecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-262/
Major implementations
V8, JavaScriptCore, SpiderMonkey;
Chakra (deprecated)
Influenced by
Java, Scheme, Self, AWK, HyperTalk
Influenced
ActionScript, ArkTS, AssemblyScript, CoffeeScript, Dart, Haxe, JS++, Opa, TypeScript

JavaScript (/ˈɑːvəskrɪpt/ ), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.

Web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine that executes the client code. These engines are also utilized in some servers and a variety of apps. The most popular runtime system for non-browser usage is Node.js.

JavaScript is a high-level, often just-in-time–compiled language that conforms to the ECMAScript standard. It has dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions. It is multi-paradigm, supporting event-driven, functional, and imperative programming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM).

The ECMAScript standard does not include any input/output (I/O), such as networking, storage, or graphics facilities. In practice, the web browser or other runtime system provides JavaScript APIs for I/O.

Although Java and JavaScript are similar in name and syntax, the two languages are distinct and differ greatly in design.