Object.seal, read references, and code reliability

[Alex Kodat]

Yup, I kinda liked strong mode but the good news/bad news was that you got a lot of behaviors in a single package which was convenient but also problematic if any of the behaviors proved inappropriate for a context.

IMO, improving code reliability is trench warfare where progress is usually measured in inches and while I think Object.guard is a useful tool I’m under no illusions that it’s a game-changer (any more than Object.seal, say). But there are a large number of cases where when a programmer mistakenly types foo.bah as opposed to foo.bar it is inarguably a mistake and you’re doing the programmer a favor by immediately pointing out the error.  So if we could catch these cases relatively easily with (almost?) no cost, why not?

I’ll concede that there are issues here that I and others have brought up that suggest that Object.guard is not quite as simple as Object.seal but I believe these issues are not so daunting as to disqualify the feature. But reasonable people could disagree.

As far as performance goes, I don’t see how Object.guard could possibly improve performance. That’s not its purpose.

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Alex Kodat
Senior Product Architect
Rocket Software
t: +1 781 684 2294 • m: +1 315 527 4764 • w: www.rocketsoftware.com<http://www.rocketsoftware.com/>

From: Isiah Meadows [mailto:isiahmeadows at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2017 12:57 AM
To: Alex Kodat <akodat at rocketsoftware.com>; Jordan Harband <ljharb at gmail.com>
Cc: es-discuss at mozilla.org
Subject: Re: Object.seal, read references, and code reliability

Just a quick note: Look up "strong mode", an experiment by Google attempting to look for code quality improvement and perf gains for locking class instances by default. I feel it's pretty relevant here, and here's a quick summary of their general findings:

1. It helped code quality only *a little* (stuff better code design could solve better)
2. It had very little gain in performance

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