V8 adds destructuring from  JavaScript ES6. Legacy Apps Script already had destructuring of arrays added fairly recently, but v8 gives full a destructuring capabilitity. These destructuring and spreading capabilities, which at first may again seem a little like syntactic sugar, have contributed greatly to  the development of state management frameworks such as Vuex and Redux for client side apps. V8 brings some of that cleanliness to Apps Script.

Source: Apps Script V8: spreading and destructuring – Desktop liberation

Martin Hawksey

Member of Google Developers Experts Program for Google Workspace (Google Apps Script) and interested in supporting Google Workspace Devs.

mashe.hawksey.info

V8 adds the arrow function declarator from modern JavaScript. This is a handy shorthand but it’s more than just that. There are some behavioral differences too that you’ll need to understand before diving in. The old way of declaring functions still exists of course, and there will always be a need for it.

More tips and guidance from Bruce Mcpherson for developers migrating code to the Apps Script V8 runtime.

Source: JavaScript V8 Arrow functions, this and that – Desktop liberation

Martin Hawksey

Member of Google Developers Experts Program for Google Workspace (Google Apps Script) and interested in supporting Google Workspace Devs.

mashe.hawksey.info

Sets and Maps can often be a cleaner way of storing data than using Objects or Arrays, even though at first glance they may seem a little redundant. Unlike an array, they are aware of what else is in the map or set (so you can avoid duplicates), and unlike an object, you can use anything as the key – including the item value itself

Given many Apps Script projects focus on manipulating data Bruce Mcpherson provides a useful introduction to Maps and Sets.

Source: Apps Script V8: Maps and Sets – Desktop liberation

Martin Hawksey

Member of Google Developers Experts Program for Google Workspace (Google Apps Script) and interested in supporting Google Workspace Devs.

mashe.hawksey.info

It’s a shorthand way of using a template into which variables are subsituted in a string. This allows for better reuse of string structures, and a few other goodies besides (like all V8 additions, it’s more than just a syntactical spruce up)

Bruce Mcpherson has a very useful post highlighting the benefits of using the new V8 runtime when working with string output

Source: Apps Script V8: Template literals – Desktop liberation

Martin Hawksey

Member of Google Developers Experts Program for Google Workspace (Google Apps Script) and interested in supporting Google Workspace Devs.

mashe.hawksey.info

One of the key things that V8 has sorted out is the scope of variables. Using var to declare variables meant that anything declared within the scope of a function could easily be accidentally overwritten, causing hard to track down errors. ES6 (since it’s commonly known as V8 in Apps Script – I’ll be referring to it as V8 from now on), has added const and let to the variable declaration vocabulary to help prevent these kind of problems.

With the introduction to the new Google Apps Script V8 runtime new opportunities are available for writing clean and robust code in the script editor using modern JavaScript syntax. In this post from Bruce Mcpherson you can learn some of the basics of var, const and let.

Source: JavaScript V8 variable scopes – Desktop liberation

Martin Hawksey

Member of Google Developers Experts Program for Google Workspace (Google Apps Script) and interested in supporting Google Workspace Devs.

mashe.hawksey.info