FlashFreeze: Low-Overhead JavaScript Instrumentation for Function Serialization
Jonathan Van der Cruysse, Lode Hoste, Wolfgang Van Raemdonck
Published in Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection, co-located with SPLASH, 2019
Object serialization is important to a variety of applications, including session migration and distributed computing. A general JavaScript object serializer must support function serialization as functions are first-class objects. However, JavaScript offers no built-in function serialization and limits custom serializers by exposing no meta operator to query a function’s captured variables. Code instrumentation can expose captured variables but state-of-the-art instrumentation techniques introduce high overheads, vary in supported syntax and/or use complex (de)serialization algorithms. We introduce FlashFreeze, an instrumentation technique based on capture lists. FlashFreeze achieves a tiny run time overhead: an Octane score reduction of 3% compared to 76% for the state-of-the-art ThingsMigrate tool and 1% for the work-in-progress FSM tool. FlashFreeze supports all self-contained ECMAScript 5 programs except for specific uses of eval, with, and source code inspection. FlashFreeze’s construction gives rise to simple (de)serialization algorithms.
Download paper here. FlashFreeze is an open source npm module. Its source code is here.
BibTeX citation:
@inproceedings{vandercruysse2019flashfreeze,
author = {Van der Cruysse, Jonathan and Hoste, Lode and Van Raemdonck, Wolfgang},
title = {FlashFreeze: Low-Overhead JavaScript Instrumentation for Function Serialization},
year = {2019},
isbn = {9781450369855},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3358502.3361268},
doi = {10.1145/3358502.3361268},
abstract = {Object serialization is important to a variety of applications, including session migration and distributed computing. A general JavaScript object serializer must support function serialization as functions are first-class objects. However, JavaScript offers no built-in function serialization and limits custom serializers by exposing no meta operator to query a function’s captured variables. Code instrumentation can expose captured variables but state-of-the-art instrumentation techniques introduce high overheads, vary in supported syntax and/or use complex (de)serialization algorithms. We introduce FlashFreeze, an instrumentation technique based on capture lists. FlashFreeze achieves a tiny run time overhead: an Octane score reduction of 3\% compared to 76\% for the state-of-the-art ThingsMigrate tool and 1\% for the work-in-progress FSM tool. FlashFreeze supports all self-contained ECMAScript 5 programs except for specific uses of eval, with, and source code inspection. FlashFreeze’s construction gives rise to simple (de)serialization algorithms.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection},
pages = {31–39},
numpages = {9},
keywords = {Serialization, Closures, Compilers, TypeScript, JavaScript, Instrumentation},
location = {Athens, Greece},
series = {META 2019}
}