proposal-global

> It’s not a global `print` function that’s called but `window.print`, right? `print` is sugar for `this.print` and `this` is the window object if it’s not explicitly bound to something else. This is a common point of confusion because in a browser the global object is traditionally the same as window (or “self” or “frames”) so there wasn't a difference for many years until ES5 introduced strict mode, which left the default as undefined instead of silently using the global object, and things further fractured with Node (where it's “global”) and Web Workers (where only “self” works). (In browsers this is also complicated by the Window/WindowProxy distinction — see https://blog.whatwg.org/windowproxy-window-and-location and especially https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/globalthis#terminology) A couple years back, “globalThis” was added to make

A few things: 1) In browsers, the actual global (the Window) is _never_ exposed to script. The reasons for that used to do with same-origin policy enforcement, with exposure of the Window to script being considered a security bug in various browsers for a while, but I'm not sure those reasons are still relevant nowadays. At this point, the main reason the WindowProxy is what's exposed is that this is what web authors and web code expect. It's actually quite terrible, because it conflates two objects: "the web page" (corresponding to the non-exposed Window) and "the thing we load web pages in" (corresponding to the WindowProxy). _That_ is a design mistake in the web's object model that dates back to the mid-'90s... In any case, the upshot is that in browser window contexts you can't get a reference to the global; the only thing you can

They finally implemented globalThis [0]! It's not a huge or complex feature, but it's been something I've been wanting for a long time. Now there's a portable way to access the global object. I would've preferred `global`, but that broke web compatibility which made it a non-starter. I just checked and was a bit sad to find that the latest version of node still doesn't support it. This is a bit surprising as globalThis is already supported in Chrome. [0] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global

Followed the links of the article a bit. The document explaining the process of finding a good name ("globalThis") for global is pretty cool: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global/blob/master/NAMING.m...

I think breaking JS tends to be much more destructive than dead links. At least with dead links there's a fairly clear non-technical fix. With a web standards break, maybe 8 years ago you hired a contractor to build a website that uses a library that uses a library that uses a library that uses some JS feature that is now broken, so your website is now completely broken. Some of those libraries are on older unmaintained versions, where the only upgrade would be through non-trivial breaking changes, or you would need to just find alternate libraries. Getting things working again is a huge undertaking, not just a matter of "don't use that weird JS feature anymore", and I think in that situation it seems reasonable to blame the browser for the breaking change. It's also maybe more widespread than you'd think. Adding `global` seemed safe for