proposal-ecmascript-sharedmem

Try/catch point is an in-general thing. Irrespective of language. Always better to handle errors by yourself. I was not aware of the browser deprecation of Shared array buffer. But this (or something like this) is a part of the ECMA proposal which is in stage 4. https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem I said using forEach (or in-builts) are always a good practice. Now like you have to. For an example, if you have an array with no holes in it, for is better performant then forEach.

It strikes me as odd that Project Zero is listed as having discovered this in mid-2017. It seems like this vulnerability and the browser mitigations being considered only just now were discussed quite some time ago: This comment was on April 7, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057091 And this one from 2015? https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem/issues/1

This is far from the first attempt to do bring multithreading/parallelism into JS. A (failed) example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Trail_(JavaScript_engine... Another attempt (although a different approach) is here : https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem Hopefully, Microsoft will learn from the errors of others. Interestingly, napa is build on V8, not on MS own javascript engine.

Proposals [0] that made it into ES8 (“what’s new”): * Object.values/Object.entries - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-object-values-entries * String padding - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-string-pad-start-end * Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors - https://github.com/ljharb/proposal-object-getownpropertydesc... * Trailing commas - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-trailing-function-commas * Async functions - https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript-asyncawait * Shared memory and atomics - https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem The first five have been available via Babel and/or polyfills for ~18 months or so, so they’ve been used for a while now. [0] https://github.com/tc39/proposals/blob/master/finished-propo...

The shared memory and atomics proposal was approved as part of the ES2017 spec. https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem

If Chrome is going to ship SharedArrayBuffer, then why will the resolution of performance.now() and other timer APIs continue to be neutered? I don't have any preference one way or the other for implementing SharedArrayBuffer, but I am fully against neutering timers with jitter if a vendor does choose to implement SharedArrayBuffer. Random additional timer jitter becomes a false layer of security in this scenario, and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=506723 should be reverted. With SharedArrayBuffer you can easily implement extremely high resolution sub-nanosecond timers and open the door to new timing attacks. For example, here is a high resolution SharedArrayBuffer timer: https://codepen.io/yossioren/pen/LVBNMR For more discussion regarding the security implications of this change, see https://github.com/tc39/ecmasc

I am not sure I like some of the new changes. It seems to me like JS is expanding both towards an upper level language and a lower level language, which frankly makes it look more like a Frankenlanguage. I guess it's the limitations of having a single real language to be used in the browsers. Edit: just check this tutorial. I'd venture to guess to 99% of JS developers it sounds totally bizarre: https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem/blob/master/TUT...

SharedArrayBuffer has been accepted as stage 2 in tc39 so there is now a good chance you will have this from JavaScript as well. https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_sharedmem