On the design of the ECMAScript Reflection API
Venue
TOPLAS (Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems) (2012)
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Tom Van Cutsem, Mark S. Miller
BibTeX
Abstract
We describe in detail the new reflection API of the upcoming Javascript standard.
The most prominent feature of this new API is its support for creating proxies:
virtual objects that behave as regular objects, but whose entire “meta-object
protocol” is implemented in Javascript itself. Next to a detailed description of
the API, we describe a more general set of design principles that helped steer the
API’s design, and which should be applicable to similar APIs for other languages.
We also describe access control abstractions implemented in the new API, and
provide an operational semantics of an extension of the untyped lambda-calculus
featuring proxies.
