JavaScript Articles
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Debugger.html Call Stack Improvements
Debugger.html is an open source project, built on top of React and Redux, that functions as a standalone debugger for Firefox, Chrome and Node. The debugger is also being integrated into the Firefox Developer Tools offering. Currently it is available in the Firefox 53 release behind the devtools.debugger.new-debugger-frontend preference.
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Fathom: a framework for understanding web pages
Meet Fathom, a mini-language for writing semantic extractors, that you can use client- or server-side to extract meaning from the content of a web page. Scoop up all those ideas you threw away because they required too much understanding by the browser. We can do that now.
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Internationalize your keyboard controls
Recently I came across two lovely new graphical demos, and in both cases, the controls would not work on my French AZERTY keyboard. There was the wonderful WebGL 2 technological demo After The Flood, and the very cute Alpaca Peck. Shaw was nice enough to fix the latter when I told him about the issue. […]
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A crash course in just-in-time (JIT) compilers
This is the second part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. If you haven’t read the others, we recommend starting from the beginning. JavaScript started out slow, but then got faster thanks to something called the JIT. This article is about how the JIT works.
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A crash course in assembly
To understand how WebAssembly works, it helps to understand what assembly is and how compilers produce it. Third part in a series on WebAssembly and what makes it fast. We recommend starting from the beginning.
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Creating and working with WebAssembly modules
WebAssembly is a way to run programming languages other than JavaScript on web pages. In the past when you wanted to run code in the browser to interact with the different parts of the web page, your only option was JavaScript. So when people talk about WebAssembly being fast, the apples to apples comparison is to JavaScript. Fourth in a series on WebAssembly.
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What makes WebAssembly fast?
Programming with WebAssembly or JavaScript is not an either/or choice. So developers don’t need to choose between WebAssembly and JavaScript. However, we do expect that developers will swap out parts of their JavaScript code for WebAssembly. Fifth in a series about WebAssembly.
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Where is WebAssembly now and what’s next?
On February 28, the four major browsers announced their consensus that the MVP of WebAssembly is complete. Even in the initial release, WebAssembly will be fast. But it should get even faster in the future, through a combination of fixes and new features. Sixth in a series about WebAssembly.
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TypedArray or DataView: Understanding byte order
Depending on how you access an ArrayBuffer you get different byte order on the same machine. So long story short: it makes a difference if you use a TypedArray or the setters from a DataView.
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Async/Await Arrive in Firefox
The new
asyncandawaitkeywords—which make asynchronous code more concise, obvious, and maintainable—have arrived in Firefox 52. Currently available in the latest Developer Edition release, Firefox 52 is scheduled for general release in March 2017.
