TC39 Signals Proposal Sparks Debate Over How Much JavaScript Should Standardize

JavaScript frameworks have independently developed incompatible reactive programming systems, making it difficult to share or compose reactive logic across ecosystems. The TC39 Signals proposal aims to resolve this by standardizing a full reactive graph, including writable signals, dependency tracking, and scheduling semantics. A competing perspective argues for a narrower standard — one that defines only an invalidation protocol and a lazy, cached derivation primitive, leaving policies like scheduling, equality, and effects to individual frameworks. Proponents of the minimal approach contend that ECMAScript additions are effectively permanent, so a smaller, more flexible substrate reduces the risk of locking the ecosystem into a single reactive architecture. Under this model, interoperability would be achieved through a shared behavioral protocol rather than a unified graph, allowing diverse reactive systems — from proxies to immutable stores — to coexist.