Alex Vincent: Introducing es7-membrane: A new ECMAScript 2016 Membrane implementation

Вторник, 23 Августа 2016 г. 04:28 + в цитатник

I have a new ECMAScript membrane implementation, which I will maintain and use in a professional capacity, and which I’m looking for lots of help with in the form of code reviews and API design advice.

For those of you who don’t remember what a membrane is, Tom van Cutsem wrote about membranes a few years ago, including the first implementations in JavaScript. I recently answered a StackOverflow question on why a membrane might be useful in the first place.

Right now, the membrane supports “perfect” mirroring across object graphs: as far as I can tell, separate object graphs within the same membrane never see objects or functions from another object graph.

The word “perfect” is in quotes because there are probably bugs, facets I haven’t yet tested for (“What happens if I call Object.freeze() on a proxy from the membrane?”, for example). There is no support yet for the real uses of proxies, such as hiding properties, exposing new ones, or special handling of primitive values. That support is forthcoming, as I do expect I will need a membrane in my “Verbosio” project (an experimental XML editor concept, irrelevant to this group) and another for the company I work for.

The good news is the tests pass in Node 6.4, the current Google Chrome release, and Mozilla Firefox 51 (trunk, debug build). I have not tested any other browser or ECMAScript environment. I also will be checking in lots of use cases over the next few weeks which will guide future work on the module.

With all that said, I’d love to get some help. That’s why I moved it to its own GitHub repository.

None of this code has been reviewed yet. My colleagues at work are not qualified to do a code or API review on this. (This isn’t a knock on them – proxies are a pretty obscure part of the ECMAScript universe…) I’m looking for some volunteers to do those reviews.
I have two or three different options, design-wise, for making a Membrane’s proxies customizable while still obeying the rules of the Membrane. I’m assuming there’s some supremely competent people from the es-discuss mailing list who could offer advice through the GitHub project’s wiki pages.
I’d like also to properly wrap the baseline code as ES6 modules using the import, export statements – but I’m not sure if they’re safe to use in current release browsers or Node. (I’ve been skimming Dr. Axel Rauschmeyer’s “Exploring ES6” chapter on ES6 modules.)
- Side note: try { import /* … */ } catch (e) { /* … */ } seems to be illegal syntax, and I’d really like to know why. (The error from trunk Firefox suggested import needed to be on the first line, and I had the import block on the second line, after the try statement.)
This is my first time publishing a serious open-source project to GitHub, and my absolute first attempt at publishing to NPM:
I’m not familiar with Node, nor with “proper” packaging of modules pre-ES6. So my build-and-test systems need a thorough review too.
I’m having trouble properly setting up continuous integration. Right now, the build reports as passing but is internally erroring out…
Pretty much any of the other GitHub/NPM-specific goodies (a static demo site, wiki pages for discussions, keywords for the npm package, a Tonic test case, etc.) don’t exist yet.
Of course, anyone who has interest in membranes is welcome to offer their feedback.