research-article

Typed objects in JavaScript

Authors:

Nicholas D. Matsakis,

Dmitry LomovAuthors Info & Claims

DLS '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Dynamic languages

Pages 125 - 134

https://doi.org/10.1145/2661088.2661095

Published: 14 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

JavaScript's typed arrays have proven to be a crucial API for many JS applications, particularly those working with large amounts of data or emulating other languages. Unfortunately, the current typed array API offers no means of abstraction. Programmers are supplied with a simple byte buffer that can be viewed as an array of integers or floats, but nothing more.

This paper presents a generalization of the typed arrays API entitled typed objects. The typed objects API is slated for inclusion in the upcoming ES7 standard. The API gives users the ability to define named types, making typed arrays much easier to work with. In particular, it is often trivial to replace uses of existing JavaScript objects with typed objects, resulting in better memory consumption and more predictable performance.

The advantages of the typed object specification go beyond convenience, however. By supporting opacity---that is, the ability to deny access to the raw bytes of a typed object---the new typed object specification makes it possible to store objects as well as scalar data and also enables more optimization by JIT compilers.

References

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Digital Library

Cited By

Toufie ZKabaso B(2023)The Next Evolution of Web Browser Execution Environment Performance2023 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Computing and Data Communication Systems (icABCD)10.1109/icABCD59051.2023.10220564(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/icABCD59051.2023.10220564

Index Terms

Typed objects in JavaScript
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Data types and structures

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DLS '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Dynamic languages

October 2014

160 pages

ISBN:9781450332118

DOI:10.1145/2661088

General Chair:
Andrew Black
Portland State University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Laurence Tratt
King's College London, UK

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 50, Issue 2
DLS '14
February 2015
146 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2775052
Editor:
Andy Gill
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Published: 14 October 2014

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SPLASH '14

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SPLASH '14: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 20 - 24, 2014

Oregon, Portland, USA

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DLS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 28 submissions, 46%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 77 submissions, 42%

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Cited By

Toufie ZKabaso B(2023)The Next Evolution of Web Browser Execution Environment Performance2023 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Computing and Data Communication Systems (icABCD)10.1109/icABCD59051.2023.10220564(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/icABCD59051.2023.10220564

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