ECMAScript 5 Compatibility Shims

es5-shim and es5-sham are JavaScript libraries designed to provide ECMAScript 5 (ES5) compatibility shims and polyfills for legacy JavaScript engines that lack native support for these features. The current stable version is 4.6.7, which was last published over four years ago (as of early 2022), indicating an extremely slow release cadence and placing the project firmly in maintenance mode, rather than active development. es5-shim.js faithfully emulates many ES5 methods like Array iteration methods, Date.now, and Function.prototype.bind, making them available in older environments. es5-sham.js, on the other hand, provides best-effort shims for features that cannot be fully or faithfully emulated (such as Object.create with property descriptors, Object.freeze, or Object.defineProperty). A key differentiator is its direct monkey-patching of the global JavaScript context, making it suitable for environments without modern transpilation or module bundling, particularly for ensuring compatibility in very old browser environments like Internet Explorer 8.