An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs

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Author

Jan Vitek

Tech report number

CERIAS TR 2010-20

Entry type

article

Abstract

The JavaScript programming language is widely used for web programming and, increasingly, for general purpose computing. As such, improving the correctness, security and performance of JavaScript applications has been the driving force for research in type systems, static analysis and compiler techniques for this language. Many of these techniques aim to reign in some of the most dynamic features of the language, yet little seems to be known about how programmers actually utilize the language or these features. In this paper we perform an empirical study of the dynamic behavior of a corpus of widely-used JavaScript programs, and analyze how and why the dynamic features are used. We report on the degree of dynamism that is exhibited by these JavaScript programs and compare that with assumptions commonly made in the literature and accepted industry benchmark suites.

Date

2010 – 1 – 1

URL

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806598

Key alpha

Vitek

Publication Date

2010-01-01

BibTex-formatted data

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@Article{ Vitek,
	title = "An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs",
	author = "Jan Vitek",
	year = "2010",
	month = "1",
	day = "1",
	abstract = "The JavaScript programming language is widely used for web programming and, increasingly, for general purpose computing. As such, improving the correctness, security and performance of JavaScript applications has been the driving force for research in type systems, static analysis and compiler techniques for this language. Many of these techniques aim to reign in some of the most dynamic features of the language, yet little seems to be known about how programmers actually utilize the language or these features. In this paper we perform an empirical study of the dynamic behavior of a corpus of widely-used JavaScript programs, and analyze how and why the dynamic features are used. We report on the degree of dynamism that is exhibited by these JavaScript programs and compare that with assumptions commonly made in the literature and accepted industry benchmark suites.",
	url = "http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806598",
}