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Ask for Feedback: Make `JSObject` / `JSFunction` calls be `throws`

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#272 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, swift, wasm
Domain
api

Research direction

The issue names JSObject and JSFunction as the affected APIs but gives no file or test entry point. Review their call implementations and existing .throws/.throwing behavior, then measure the performance trade-off and define tests for throwing and nonthrowing calls before deciding the breaking API change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Every dynamic JS function calls can throw an exception, but the current JSObject and JSFunction are non-throws by default.
They can be throws by .throws or .throwing but it's still opt-in.

For example, if an exception is thrown during a JS function call but the call site in Swift side is not throws, the control unwinding wasm call frames without executing function epilogues even if there is do { } catch {} clause in Swift. And also in that case, defer blocks won't be called.

This behavior is quite tricky and unwinding wasm call frames without executing function epilogues can lead to memory and resource leak.

I'm going to introduce an API breaking change to make JSObject / JSFunction calls be throws in the next next release to improve the situation.

This change has a performance tradeoff as throws variants are typically a little bit slower than non-throwing variants. We should measure the amount of the penalty but it shouldn't be a big deal. We can make non throwing calls as an opt-in feature so that those who want best performance can satisfy their needs.

// Before
let foo = JSObject.global.document.getElementById!("foo")
let foo = try JSObject.global.document.throwing.getElementById!("foo")

// After
let foo = try JSObject.global.document.getElementById!("foo")
let foo = JSObject.global.document.nonthrowing.getElementById!("foo")

Let me know here if you have a strong objection 🙏 Thanks.

Dominant language
Swift
Stars
986
Forks
76
Avg merge
21h 11m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

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