Wed 20 Jun 2018 11:50 - 12:15 at Grand Ballroom AB - Web Pages Chair(s): Tobias Wrigstad

Scores of compilers produce JavaScript, enabling programmers to use many languages on the Web, reuse existing code, and even use Web IDEs. Unfortunately, most compilers inherit the browser's compromised execution model, so long-running programs freeze the browser tab, infinite loops crash IDEs, and so on. The few compilers that avoid these problems suffer poor performance and are difficult to engineer.

This paper presents Stopify, a source-to-source compiler that extends JavaScript with debugging abstractions and blocking operations, and easily integrates with existing compilers. We apply Stopify to ten programming languages and develop a Web IDE that supports stopping, single-stepping, breakpointing, and long-running computations. For nine languages, Stopify requires no or trivial compiler changes. For eight, our IDE is the first that provides these features. Two of our subject languages have compilers with similar features. Stopify’s performance is competitive with these compilers and it makes them dramatically simpler.

Stopify’s abstractions rely on first-class continuations, which it provides by compiling JavaScript to JavaScript. We also identify sub-languages of JavaScript that compilers implicitly use, and exploit these to improve performance. Finally, Stopify needs to repeatedly interrupt and resume program execution. We use a sampling-based technique to estimate program speed that outperforms other systems.

Wed 20 Jun

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

11:00 - 12:15
Web PagesPLDI Research Papers at Grand Ballroom AB
Chair(s): Tobias Wrigstad Uppsala University
11:00
25m
Talk
Verifying That Web Pages Have Accessible Layout
PLDI Research Papers
Pavel Panchekha University of Washington, Adam T. Geller University of Washington, USA, Michael D. Ernst University of Washington, USA, Zachary Tatlock University of Washington, Seattle, Shoaib Kamil Adobe
Media Attached
11:25
25m
Talk
BLeak: Automatically Debugging Memory Leaks in Web Applications
PLDI Research Papers
John Vilk University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Emery D. Berger University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Media Attached
11:50
25m
Talk
Putting in All the Stops: Execution Control for JavaScript
PLDI Research Papers
Samuel Baxter University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA, Rachit Nigam , Joe Gibbs Politz University of California, San Diego, Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University, USA, Arjun Guha University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Media Attached