Ashley Williams

JavaScript's Journey to the Edge | JSConf EU 2019

In September of 2008, Google’s Chromium Project released V8, a JavaScript engine, as part of a browser optimization wave that heralded the era of JavaScript browser applications that we both love, and love to hate. Less than a year later, in 2009, Ryan Dahl announced (at this very conference!) a way to run the V8 browser environment outside of the browser- Node.js, a platform that held the promise of unifying web application development, where both client and server side development could happen in the same language - JavaScript. A decade later, V8, JavaScript, and its new buddy WebAssembly, have expanded to lands charted only a few years after Node.js debuted- known (confusingly) as the “Edge”. In this talk, we’ll introduce what the “Edge” is and why we are excited for it to revolutionize computation on the web. We’ll explore how this adventurous JavaScript engine, V8, is so well suited to tasks previously limited to Virtual Machines, Containers, or even simply Operating Systems. Finally, we’ll talk about security, Spectre, and ask ourselves the age old question, “You can do it, but should you?”.