What is the difference between 'let' and 'const' ECMAScript 2015 (ES6)?

Question

I'm wondering what is the difference between let and const in ES6. Both of them are block scoped, as the example in the following code:

const PI = 3.14;
console.log(PI);

PI = 3;
console.log(PI);

const PI = 4;
console.log(PI);

var PI = 5;
console.log(PI);

In ES5 the output will be:

3.14
3.14
3.14
3.14

But in ES6 it will be:

3.14
3
4
5

I'm wondering why ES6 allows the change of const value, the question is why should we use 'const' now? we can use 'let' instead?

Note: jsbin can be used for testing, choose JavaScript to run ES5 code and Traceur to run it with ES6 capabilities.

Answer 1

The difference between let and const is that once you bind a value/object to a variable using const, you can't reassign to that variable. In other words Example:

const something = {};
something = 10; // Error.

let somethingElse = {};
somethingElse = 1000; // This is fine.

The question details claim that this is a change from ES5 — this is actually a misunderstanding. Using const in a browser that only supports ECMAScript 5 will always throw an error. The const statement did not exist in ECMAScript 5. The behaviour in is either JS Bin being misleading as to what type of JavaScript is being run, or it’s a browser bug.

In practice, browsers didn't just go from 0% support for ECMAScript 2015 (ECMAScript 6) to 100% in one go — features are added bit-by-bit until the browser is fully compliant. What JS Bin calls ‘JavaScript’ just means whatever ECMAScript features your browser currently supports — it doesn’t mean ‘ES5’ or ‘ES6’ or anything else. Many browsers supported const and let before they fully supported ES6, but some (like Firefox) treated const like let for some time. It is likely that the question asker’s browser supported let and const but did not implement them correctly.

Secondly, tools like Babel and Traceur do not make ES6 ‘run’ in an older browser — they instead turn ES6 code into ES5 that does approximately the same thing. Traceur is likely turning const statements into var statements, but I doubt it is always enforcing that the semantics of a const statement are exactly replicated in ES5. Using JS Bin to run ES6 using Traceur is not going to give exactly the same results as running ES6 in a fully ES6 specification-compliant browser.

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It is important to note that const does not make a value or object immutable.

const myArray = [];
myArray.push(1); // Works fine.
myArray[1] = 2; // Also works fine.
console.log(myArray); // [1, 2]
myArray = [1, 2, 3] // This will throw.

Probably the best way to make an object (shallowly) immutable at the moment is to use Object.freeze() on it. However, this only makes the object itself read-only; the values of the object’s properties can still be mutated.