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A model for reasoning about JavaScript promises

Authors:

Ondřej Lhoták,

Frank TipAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 1, Issue OOPSLA

Article No.: 86, Pages 1 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/3133910

Published: 12 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In JavaScript programs, asynchrony arises in situations such as web-based user-interfaces, communicating with servers through HTTP requests, and non-blocking I/O. Event-based programming is the most popular approach for managing asynchrony, but suffers from problems such as lost events and event races, and results in code that is hard to understand and debug. Recently, ECMAScript 6 has added support for promises, an alternative mechanism for managing asynchrony that enables programmers to chain asynchronous computations while supporting proper error handling. However, promises are complex and error-prone in their own right, so programmers would benefit from techniques that can reason about the correctness of promise-based code.

Since the ECMAScript 6 specification is informal and intended for implementers of JavaScript engines, it does not provide a suitable basis for formal reasoning. This paper presents λ_p, a core calculus that captures the essence of ECMAScript 6 promises. Based on λ_p, we introduce the promise graph, a program representation that can assist programmers with debugging of promise-based code. We then report on a case study in which we investigate how the promise graph can be helpful for debugging errors related to promises in code fragments posted to the StackOverflow website.

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Cited By

Lauwaerts TMarr SScholliers C(2024)Latch: Enabling large-scale automated testing on constrained systemsScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2024.103157238(103157)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2024.103157
Ganji MAlimadadi STip FChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Code Coverage Criteria for Asynchronous ProgramsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616292(1307-1319)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616292
Gu QKe W(2023)Typing Composable Coroutines2023 12th International Conference on Computer Technologies and Development (TechDev)10.1109/TechDev61156.2023.00011(16-23)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
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Index Terms

A model for reasoning about JavaScript promises
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Object oriented languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning
    2. Program semantics
      1. Operational semantics

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 1, Issue OOPSLA

October 2017

1786 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3152284

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Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 12 October 2017

Published in PACMPL Volume 1, Issue OOPSLA

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Cited By

Lauwaerts TMarr SScholliers C(2024)Latch: Enabling large-scale automated testing on constrained systemsScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2024.103157238(103157)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2024.103157
Ganji MAlimadadi STip FChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Code Coverage Criteria for Asynchronous ProgramsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616292(1307-1319)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616292
Gu QKe W(2023)Typing Composable Coroutines2023 12th International Conference on Computer Technologies and Development (TechDev)10.1109/TechDev61156.2023.00011(16-23)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TechDev61156.2023.00011
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Turcotte AShah MAldrich MTip FDwyer MDamian DZeller A(2022)DrAsyncProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3510003.3510097(774-785)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
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Shriyans Dhoundiyal SRakesh NTyagi NNand PKaur M(2022)Continuous Assessment Analyzer Using DjangoComputational Intelligence in Machine Learning10.1007/978-981-16-8484-5_4(35-43)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2022
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Brachthäuser J(2022)What You See Is What You Get: Practical Effect Handlers in Capability-Passing StyleErnst Denert Award for Software Engineering 202010.1007/978-3-030-83128-8_3(15-43)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2022
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