Proposal: JavaScript Structs

Post by paulddraper » Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

badmintonbaseba wrote: post #201

paulddraper wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unsafe as in "memory segmentation fault" unsafe. It's unsafe as in, if you don't follow the rules, the resulting value is ~rand(). For those familiar with C/C++ terminology, this is the tame "unspecified behavior" (not the nasal demon "undefined behavior.")

Nit: "unspecified behavior" isn't a thing, at least without some further qualifications. It's usually "unspecified result", or "unspecified result or trap" for certain operations. "unspecified behavior" without further qualifications is just "undefined behavior". Having said that, an "unspecified result" can still come from anywhere, like a value left in a register from some previous computation or other "garbage" on…

Post by zanethomas » Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 3:08 PM UTC

wruza wrote: post #214

zanethomas wrote: post #130

I don't understand the need for the ever-growing list of "enhancements" to JS. Take Class for example. Class is entirely unnecessary and, essentially, tries to turn JS into a class-oriented language from its core which is object-oriented. I never create classes. I always create factory functions which, when appropriate, can accept other objects for composition. And I don't use prototypes, because they are unnecessary…

Otoh, I create classes, use prototypes and it’s natural and useful in many of my cases. In my dreams those who want to turn JS into c# or Java should just create a language they like and stop piling on to JS. We could even share this dream if browser vendors weren’t such whos the boss iam da boss when it comes to extensions and alternatives. So we have to live in a common denominator, which surprisingly isn’t as bad…

Post by sureglymop » Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 3:22 PM UTC

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

Post by chthonicdaemon » Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

Onavo wrote: post #296

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript is not simple AT ALL. It has 3 ways to declare functions, multiple variations on arrow functions syntax, a weird prototyping inheritance system, objects you can create out of "new" on functions, object literals that can act an pseudo-classes, classes, decorators, for-i loop + maps + filter + for-in loop (with hasOwn) + forEach, async / await + promises and an invisible but always-on event loop, objects pro…

Why did JS's with keyword not work out while similar constructs in Python and Ruby were fine?

Post by leoh » Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #10

connicpu wrote: post #7

The general idea of types with a fixed layout seems great, but I'm a lot more dubious about the idea of unsafe blocks. The web is supposed to be a sandbox where we run untrusted code and with pretty good certainty expect that it can't crash the computer. Allowing untrusted code to specify "hey let me do stuff that can cause data races if not done correctly" is just asking for trouble, and also exploits. If shared str…

Isn't it really no different to what you can already do with WASM threads though? C/C++ or unsafe Rust compiled to WASM can have data races, but the worst it can do is crash the WASM instance, just like how you can have use-after-frees or out-of-bounds array accesses in WASM but the blast radius is confined to the instance. Granted, a JS runtime is significantly more complex than a WASM runtime so there is more room…