Web Directions Global Scope 2021

JavaScript has come a long way from its humble origins as the last of the three web cornerstones (alongside CSS and HTML). We use more JavaScript than ever, spending 14 times as many bytes on it as we do for HTML and 6 times as many bytes as we do for CSS.

Nothing is free, though, and that's particularly true of JavaScript. In this session, we'll look at the current state of JavaScript—how much we use, how we use it, and what the impact is.

An introduction for developers to Temporal, which is a Stage 3 TC39 proposal soon to be implemented in JS engines, for modern date, time, time zone, and calendar handling in JS

Part of ES2020 are the Optional Chaining and Nullish Coalescing Operators. By combining these two we can make our code more robust, and also shorten it along the way. This talk takes a look at when and how we can use these two exciting ECMAScript features.

In a connected, global world there are a surprising number of problems with formatting text for our users. Did you know how many different ways there are to format a number? Or pluralise a noun? Or display a date? And let's not get into doing time zone maths for those dates. Internationalising an app by hand, and doing it correctly, could be a never-ending, full-time job.

The Intl namespace is home to the ECMAScript Internationalization API and contains the solutions to many of our formatting problems. In this talk we'll explore the available APIs that can make it easier to build a truly international application.

With Intl we can build apps that cater to all our users, wherever they are, however they write things down.

Record & Tuple is a proposed feature for JavaScript that aims to introduce new immutable value types. Records are immutable key/value structures and Tuples are immutable sequences of data. In this talk, a champion of the proposal will introduce the feature, show how it can be used, and explain how it came to be designed that way.

This presentation will dive into details of implementation of class features in JavaScriptCore, discussing some kinds of optimizations applied there.

JavaScript gets faster as it executes! Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers are used in all major JavaScript engines to improve the speed, but how do they work? By understanding the principles of JIT compilation, web developers have the opportunity to optimize their code.

Language specification can be a bit of a mystery. This talk will introduce the stages of the TC39 process for introducing a new language feature to JavaScript, and some high level concerns around our design process.

Lots of people treat the ternary operator with suspicion. At first glance, ternaries appear unnecessary. Nothing more than a tool for the overly-clever to trim some characters from their code; a favourite hack for coders who don’t care about readability. And sure, it’s all too easy to turn ternaries into an indecipherable mess. But what if we’re missing something? What if there's more to ternaries than meets the eye?

We’ll take a deep look at what makes a ternary different from an if-statement. And we’ll explore ways to write safer conditionals. Finally, we’ll examine the do-expression TC39 proposal and explore how it might help the situation.

TBA

Functional programming allows JavaScript that is easier to reason about and easier to test. Generator functions are like enhanced pure functions, allowing new software patterns for state machines, parsers, streaming HTML renderers, and more. They are composable so offer similar benefits to components yet in more domains than just the view.

A navigation over the existing realms of JavaScript and the new API proposed at TC39 to enable sandboxed code execution and document virtualization.

The way we write JavaScript is poised for dramatic change in the 2020's. Here's why: the slow death of IE11 and rollout of ES Modules will converge toward a new generation of JavaScript tooling. These tools are faster, typesafer, and polyglot, leading to both a better developer and user experience. Change is afoot!