Track: Pushing the Web Forward: JavaScript, Frameworks, Transpilers, and WebAssembly

10:35am - 11:25am

MakeCode: Types, Games and Machine Code

Microsoft MakeCode is an open-source platform and accompanying web app for building educational programming experiences (code editor, simulator, debugger, tutorials, documentation, etc.) for small, cheap embedded devices. Students can program by stacking together graphical blocks, or using Static TypeScript (STS) - a fairly extensive subset of TypeScript. STS code is compiled in the browser to machine code to run on devices with as little as 2kB of RAM. In this talk I will demo the MakeCode platform and give some technical details about the STS compiler. In particular I'm going to show MakeCode Arcade - an editor for retro-style games (160x120, 16 colors) that run in the browser and on dedicated hardware, and can be programmed very easily using modern, high-level APIs. MakeCode and all hardware to be demoed are readily available.

11:50am - 12:40pm

Javascript Open Space

Session details to follow.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

Making Npm Install Safe

There’s a JavaScript package for everything. But installing a random package is a security nightmare: the installed package can access your data and send it over the network without anyone ever knowing.

But there’s hope! This talk will discuss how to minimize the risks of running third-party JavaScript. We’ll go over POLA, the Principle of Least Authority, and how object capabilities can help us grant specific, limited resources to third-party code. We’ll also cover the current efforts to enforce security boundaries in JavaScript: SES (Secure ECMAScript) and Realms.

2:55pm - 3:45pm

Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler

For more than 20 years JavaScript has been the only 'native' language of the web. That's all changed with the release of WebAssembly. In the coming years, you'll see people writing web apps in Rust, C#, C++ and all manner of other languages. But just what is WebAssembly? And what’s all the fuss about?

WebAssembly is a low-level compilation target, which means that it is unlikely you’ll use it directly. However, as developers and hackers, we love to know how technology works!

In this talk, Colin will look at some of the internals of WebAssembly, explore how it works ‘under the hood’, and look at how you can create your own (simple) compiler that targets this runtime.

4:10pm - 5:00pm

Make Your Electron App Feel at Home Everywhere

Electron gives you the power to write a single application for Windows, MacOS and Linux. But Electron apps can easily feel out of place among other applications, exactly because you have so much freedom in designing your UI. This feeling of something being "off" often comes down to the details, not your overall UI. Kilian takes you through the process of making your app feel at home on all three platforms, making you aware of the pitfalls and how to avoid them.

5:25pm - 6:15pm

Declarative APIs in an Imperative World

Declarative UI frameworks have taken over the JavaScript landscape. Which is great, because making assumptions about your application's state is a source of pain, frustration, and bugs. But what happens when you need to glue together imperative APIs with your declarative UI framework?  

In this talk, I'll explain problems the Atom Editor team came across when we started using React as our UI framework, as well as the solutions we came up with. We'll discuss how to generalize these patterns to integrate with other imperative APIs you might come across in the wild, such as animation libraries. Finally, we'll explore what we can learn from the history of software trends over time to create a better future together.