In this episode, Thomas Steiner interviews Mozilla’s Ryan Hunt, who’s the champion of the string built-ins proposal. They first discuss Ryan’s way into Mozilla and his role in the SpiderMonkey team, and then dive deep into the string built-ins proposal and some challenges and rabbit holes with it.
Chapters:
0:00 – Introduction
0:55 – The SpiderMonkey team at Mozilla
5:01 – Ryan’s most exciting WasmGC app
7:32 – Ryan’s way into the WebAssembly world
11:12 – What are string built-ins
16:56 – The confusing concept of strings
20:32 – Calling into JavaScript from WasmAssembly
22:53 – The next built-in candidate
25:02 – String built-in and a language’s native implementation of strings
26:53 – JavaScript glue code
34:26 – The challenges with ‘this; and operators like `===`
38:06 – Actually using string built-ins
42:28 – Runtimes without a JavaScript engine and polyfilling
45:04 – Why’s Mozilla championing string built-ins
49:03 – The compact imports proposal
50:11 – Can we soft-cut the cough? Not a big deal if not.
54:15 – The memory 65 proposal
56:03 – Wasm, but not
Resources:
Ryan Hunt on LinkedIn → https://goo.gle/3Wxcfqb
SpiderMonkey blog → https://goo.gle/3Ww8ReX
WasmGC proposal → https://goo.gle/3Sz2CG7
Google Sheets WasmGC → https://goo.gle/4foOXv7
BrowserTech podcast episode with Row Zero → https://goo.gle/3SyfAUR
String Built-ins proposal → https://goo.gle/3LPXzxw
Potential other built-ins → https://goo.gle/4d445fL
Lin Clark’s post on calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly being finally fast → https://goo.gle/3WNoeRV
The problems with `this` and operators like `===` → https://goo.gle/3WrWGA8
Using built-ins → https://goo.gle/3LONEIk
Polyfilling built-ins → https://goo.gle/4fpW4DJ
Scheme Wasm compiler → https://goo.gle/3Syg6lL
OCaml compiler → https://goo.gle/3A4Qs1B
Compact impact section proposal → https://goo.gle/4d5rBZQ
Compact impact section slides → https://goo.gle/4d7NU12
Memory64 proposal → https://goo.gle/4fqmghr
Seinfeld → https://goo.gle/3YyxpHb
Frasier → https://goo.gle/46CiRYT
Scrubs → https://goo.gle/3AiWhbu
Culver’s restaurants → https://goo.gle/3LLRyBZ
Menards home improvement store → https://goo.gle/3WJpiWG
Ryan on GitHub → https://goo.gle/3A9BSG4
Watch more WasmAssembly → https://goo.gle/WasmAssembly
Subscribe to Chrome for Developers → https://goo.gle/ChromeDevs
#WebAssembly #Wasm #Strings #StringBuiltins #Standardization
Speaker: Thomas Steiner