ECMAScript Harmony: Rise of the Compilers

Brendan Eich (JavaScript)
9:50am–10:10am Tuesday, 04/21/2015
Keynotes, Keynotes
 Location: Salon 8/9
Average rating: ***..
(3.59, 22 ratings)
Slides:   1-PDF 

JavaScript is almost 20 years old, and moving faster than ever. ES6/2015 was voted through Ecma TC39 in Paris last month, ES7/2016 is being developed concurrently to prime the annual release pump, and use of compilers, notably Babel and Traceur, is on the rise. Low-level APIs such as SIMD, WebGL2, and 64-bit integer Math methods combine with higher-level facilities from generators and promises to async/await to cover the space of safely programmable hardware. Is there anything JS cannot do? I’ll give some answers.

Photo of Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich

JavaScript

Brendan Eich was founder and long-term CTO at Mozilla. He also served as SVP of engineering and briefly as CEO. Brendan is widely recognized for his enduring contributions to the Internet revolution. In 1995, he invented JavaScript (ECMAScript), the Internet’s most widely used programming language. He cofounded the Mozilla.org project in 1998, serving as chief architect, and has been a board member of the Mozilla Foundation since its inception in 2003. Brendan helped launch the award-winning Firefox web browser in November 2004 and Thunderbird email client in December 2004.

Brendan holds a BS in math and computer science from Santa Clara University and an MS in computer science from the University of Illinois.