In this post I will give an overview of Javascript’s object model. To a first approximation, by “object model”, I mean the mental model that a developer has of an object’s structure and behavior. At the end, I will hint at how proxies can be used to implement (variations on) this object model in Javascript itself.
Membranes are a powerful new feature enabled by Javascript proxies, with various use cases. The goal of a membrane is to fully isolate two object graphs. Before I can dive into more practical applications of membranes, I need to explain what a membrane is in more detail, so bear with me.
Together with PhD students Christophe Scholliers and Dries Harnie, I recently completed an operational semantics of our AmbientTalk programming language. We believe this is the first formal account of an actor language based on communicating event loops. The paper is currently available as a techreport. From the abstract:
We present an operational semantics of a key subset of the AmbientTalk programming language, AT-Lite. The subset focuses on its support for asynchronous, event-driven programming. AmbientTalk is a concurrent and distributed language that implements the so-called communicating event loops model.
Christophe has written an executable version of the operational semantics in PLT Redex. You can read all about that here.
The operational semantics builds on that of a similar model, JCobox, but significantly adapts it to more accurately reflect the semantics of AmbientTalk’s futures, which are based on E’s promises and are entirely non-blocking. And unlike JCoBox, AmbientTalk does not support cooperative multitasking within an actor, only purely sequential, run-to-completion execution of incoming messages, much like a Javascript per-frame event loop.
For the past two years, I have been working on a new Reflection API for ECMAScript (the Javascript standard) together with Mark Miller. Its most novel feature is its support for proxies, objects whose behavior in response to a large number of built-in functions and operators can be controlled in Javascript itself.
Last week, I finally finished a paper that not only describes the new API in some detail, but also describes the principles that helped steer our design. From the paper’s abstract: