Note: this proposal is now at stage 4. See the spec PR here: tc39/ecma262#3176

A proposal to make grouping of items in an array (and iterables) easier.

const array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
// `Object.groupBy` groups items by arbitrary key.
// In this case, we're grouping by even/odd keys
Object.groupBy(array, (num, index) => {
  return num % 2 === 0 ? 'even': 'odd';
});
// =>  { odd: [1, 3, 5], even: [2, 4] }
// `Map.groupBy` returns items in a Map, and is useful for grouping
// using an object key.
const odd  = { odd: true };
const even = { even: true };
Map.groupBy(array, (num, index) => {
  return num % 2 === 0 ? even: odd;
});
// =>  Map { {odd: true}: [1, 3, 5], {even: true}: [2, 4] }

• Justin Ridgewell (@jridgewell)
• Jordan Harband (@ljharb)

Current Stage: 4

Array grouping is an extremely common operation, best exemplified by SQL's GROUP BY clause and MapReduce programming (which is better thought of map-group-reduce). The ability to combine like data into groups allows developers to compute higher order datasets, like the average age of a cohort or daily LCP values for a webpage.

Two methods are offered, Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy. The first returns a null-prototype object, which allows ergonomic destructuring and prevents accidental collisions with global Object properties. The second returns a regular Map instance, which allows grouping on complex key types (imagine a compound key or tuple).

We've found a web compatibility issue with the name Array.prototype.groupBy. The Sugar library until v1.4.0 conditionally monkey-patches Array.prototype with an incompatible method. By providing a native groupBy, these versions of Sugar would fail to install their implementation, and any sites that depend on their behavior would break. We've found some 660 origins that use these versions of the Sugar library.

We then attempted the name Array.prototype.group, but this ran into code that uses an array as an arbitrary hashmap. Because these bugs are exceptionally difficult to detect (it requires devs to detect and know how to report the bug to us), the committee didn't want to attempt another prototype method name. Instead we chose to use static method, which we believe is unorthodox enough to not risk a web compatibility issue. This also gives us a nice way to support Records and Tuples in the future.

• A polyfill is available in the core-js library. You can find it in the ECMAScript proposals section.

• Lodash
  • _.groupBy (850k downloads/week)