ESNext: JavaScript “Nullish Coalescing Operator”

One of my favorite ECMAScript Proposals is the “Optional Chaining Operator”. Another proposal that forms great duo with it is the “Nullish Coalescing Operator” (sometimes also referred to as “Nullary Coalescing Operator”).

Both proposals still are Stage-1, but don’t let that stop us from taking a peek into it right now.

💁‍♂️ Stage-1?

The Technical Committee which is concerned with the standardization of ECMAScript (i.e. TC39) has a 5 stage process in place, ranging from stage-0 to stage-4, by which it develops a new language feature.

Stage-1 is the Proposal stage. It signals that the committee is showing interest in the proposal and that it is seeking further investigation on how to tackle it. At this stage the proposal is subject to heavy changes. It is only when a proposal reaches Stage 4 that it is ready to become part of the ECMAScript Specification.

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The problem

As explained in the “Optional Chaining Operator” post we can get properties of an object in a fail safe way using Short-Circuit Logic or by using the proposed Optional Chaining operator (?.) in the nearby future:

// Today: Extract firstName using Short-Circuit Logic
const firstName = message.body && message.body.user && message.body.user.firstName;

// Near future: Extract firstName using the Optional Chaining Operator
const firstName = message.body?.user?.firstName;

A common technique used is to add a default fallback value using the logical OR operator (||):

const firstName = message.body?.user?.firstName || 'Stranger';

Whilst this works fine, there is one problem with falsy values: when the left hand side of the OR expression evaluates to falsy (e.g. null, undefined, false, 0, empty string, …), the right hand side of the expression will be used. For null and undefined that’s not a problem, but it is for false, 0, empty string, etc.:

const message = {
    settings: {
        animationDuration: 0,
        showSplashScreen: false
    },
};

const showSplashScreen = message.settings?.showSplashScreen || true;
// --> true 🚫

The result here is true (the fallback), even though message.settings.showSplashScreen was defined to be false.

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The solution

The proposed Nullish Coalescing Operator ?? is intended to provide a solution to this problem. It serves as an equality check against nullary values (e.g.
null or undefined). Whenever the expression to the left of the ?? operator evaluates to either undefined or null, the value defined to the right will be returned.

Combined with the Optional Chaining Operator, our code snipped can be fixed like this:

const message = {
    settings: {
        animationDuration: 0,
        showSplashScreen: false
    },
};

const showSplashScreen = message.settings?.showSplashScreen ?? true;
// --> false 🎉

Small change, big impact 🙂

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So, when can we us this?

You can use the Nullish Coalescing Operator today already thanks to Babel’s plugin-proposal-nullish-coalescing-operator plugin (for use with Babel 7).

Do note that the proposal still Stage-1 (soon Stage-2 by the looks of it) and might still change in the future.

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In short