JS

Other

By using flag --require ./path/toFile.js for node we can add some file to be called with main file we call

usage: add some global module that is not required in other files

Node shortcuts

npm run start -> npm start -> npm s? npm install -> npm i npm run test -> npm test -> npm t

JSDoc

add typing to functions with native JS

to use, add comment before function in this format:

/**
* @param {number} a
* @param {string} b
*/

Interesting

if you declare variable inside <script> tag it will become global

Stop Throwing Errors

JS doesn’t treat errors as values, so we can’t be sure that function won’t throw at runtime without knowing it’s implementation

this leads to risk of missing try/catch

we can fix it by using explicit return type like this:

type Return = {success: false; error: Error} | {success: true; data: SomeDataType}

now we can be sure that function might return error, as well as handle it without try/catch

it is not always best solution, because sometimes it is good to throw error, so some middleware or other catcher will catch and handle it, but this strategy is useful

Data normalizing

Data normalizing - process of transforming arbitrary list of data to list where we have one entity at a time and in other places we have links to this entity

V8

JS engine by google

Compiles js into machine code with features like caching, optimizing, garbage collection etc Used in browsers and Node.js

Code inside try {} is not optimized and usually slower

Regex (Regular Expression)

Regex is used to validate/filter some text data Works by comparing substr inside str

Regex is heavy operation, so better use simple expressions for small data sets

sometimes better use self written solution

Blob

Blob - binary large object, used in JS as basic protocol for working with binary data

can be streamed
there is blob->link conversion API, which is useful in cases, where you need to represent in-memory file via HTML element with src(or download via a.href)
- to force download from JS we can create invisible a component and .click()

Service Worker

Service worker - browser api

for simplicity we can call it as hybrid of proxy and js(file) between client and browser
have ability to cache, work with requests etc
async
can’t work with DOM directly
is some file, that is scoped by page, globaly etc
- if we have global and scoped sw on page only scoped will work

Use Cases

usually used with listening fetch event
caching (work with caches obj)
- can make website work offline
- usually better to init cache on install

Life Cycle

Register. Triggers every time.
- cases other steps
Download. Can be seen in network, on registration
- if registered won’t be reregistered later
Install. Goes directly after download and linked to it
- can be listened as event
Activation. Indicates that service worker is ready to work
- can be listened as event
- not always instantly triggered after install, so we can self.skipWaiting() on install stage
Update. Triggered after changes inside js file, after ~24hours of AFK
- causes downloading, installing and activation again

Other

if we change request we will see old request and changed response
active not working for first time, can be fixed with event.waintUntil(clients.claim()) on activate
can’t communicate directly, only with messages
external lib: work box

Lodash

utility library to work with different data structures in compact and clean way

it is good practice to check if some method is present before writing it

popular methods are(by convention lodash is imported as _):

.sumBy(arr, () => number) // calculate sum from array
.get(obj, 'location.to[1].propertie', default) // find some data from nested obj by path
.groupBy(arr, () => propertie) // group list of data by some field
.deepClone(obj) // return a deep cope of some obj
.uniqBy(arr, 'field') // filters array of objects to be unique by some properte
- .sortBy, .orderBy // same, action is described in name
.isEmpty(arr) // checks if array is empty or even present
- native clean way: arr?.length > 0
.isEqual(obj1, obj2) // check for deep equality

Requests

Ajax

Tool to reload-less client-server communication

XMLHTTP

Old, native, everywhere supported method to request some data

pros:

you can track downloading progress, so it is great for file upload related stuff

Fetch

Modern, well supported, native way of doing HTTP requests

Axios

Similar to Fetch, but it is a lib with some additional features, like middlewares

EventLoop - Node.js

Node.js

Node.js - JS runtime build on top of V8 Chrome Engine, with event-driven, non blocking I/O model

I/O - input / output and refers to communication with PC’s CPU

libuv lib is handling multiplatform async work with I/O for Node.js

Event-Driven model is based on Reactor pattern

make I/O request(fs.read) -> passed to EventLoop -> passed to Event Demultiplexer -> calls C++ function -> result goes back to Event Demultiplexer -> result is wrapped into event and added to Event Queue -> when call stack is empty our callback is executed with data from event

Node.js components

V8 - engine for parsing and execution of JS
libuv - provider of EventLoop and I/O operations
core modules - non standard JS modules like http, fs etc
c++ bindings - wrapper to require custom compiled C++ modules
- can be generated with Node.js compiler and required like this: require('./my-cpp-module.node');
deps - other small utility libs for low level operations

EventQueue - MarkroTasks

EventLoop - mechanism to semi-infinitelly process and handle events

Events are queued into several queues with different priorities and executed after stack is empty

Queue Name	Description	Priority	Is all events need to be executed
Timer	queue for setTimeout, setInterval	1	+
I/O	most of async operations(network, system)	2	+
Immediate	queue for setImmediate(registered and executed as soon as JS picked it up)	3	+
Close events	queue for closing connection events(DB, TCP etc)	4	+
Empty loop ~= few milliseconds

EventLoop is tracking how many ongoing tasks and when they are done, their count is decreased

if equal to 0 loop is exited

setTimeout(..., 0) !== setImmediate, because EvebtLoop CAN(not always) be so fast, that timeOut won’t be registered at all for this cycle and will appear at next

EventQueue - MicroTasks

I/O Polling

I/O events are added to their queue not when they are ready(as other events), but after I/O polling

Between each macrotasks we have JS execution period of time(same as before EventLoop), inside which we have micro tasks as process.nextTick(1 priority) Promise(2 priority), with their own dedicated queues

there also others microtasks as MutationObserver, queueMicrotask etc
microtasks are checked by V8, after all JS is executed

process.nextTick have the highest priority among all of others, BUT can block EventLoop and kill performance

microtask queues block EventLoop and must be cleared

in Node version < 11 microtasks was executed between queues and not macrotasks, but for web compatibility it was changed

EventLoop

EventLoop is not fully part of V8, V8 is only parsing and executing JS + microtasks, but macrotasks are done by libuv

EsModules

EsModules are async by design, so when we init our program, inside first EventLoop promises will have highest priority

libuv

I/O operations can be:

blocking: file, dns etc
- require different thread
non-blocking: network
- several tasks can execute in simultaneously

for blocking tasks libuv uses Thread Pool, so we can simultaneously execute this tasks on different threads(4 by default if any blocking operation is present in code) on top of that we have threads that occupied by default for garbage collection etc

DNS lookup is blocking, but can by made it non-blocking with some effort

Other

Custom promises(Bluebird.js)

Can collet all promises into one macrotask to reduce blocking time
Can executer promises on some other phase

EventLoop - Browser

Similar to Node.js EventLoop, BUT with addition to some DOM related tasks and with no strict order in macro/micro tasks queues

Most of the time JS engine doing nothing and runs only when some event, script, handler activates

Rendering happens between macrotasks and blocked by their execution

some very heavy tasks can block whole browser(not responsive to user events), so browser might suggest to kill this process with page

Same as in Node microtasks queue empties in-between each macrotask

microtasks are mostly come from promises, but can be also manually queued by queueMicrotask(func)

macrotasks

setTimeout
setInterval
setImmediate
requestAnimationFrame
I/O
UI rendering microtasks
process.nextTick
Promises
queueMicrotask
MutationObserver

Other

heavy tasks can be split into smaller once and wrapped into zero second setTimeout, that will not block DOM
- it is better to setTimeout earlier in code, because even zero second timeout has some delay in it
- you can show some loading via this split, because otherwise change in DOM will be shown after whole process is finished

Regex In JS

To create a regex in JS we can use new Regxp("pattern", "flags") or with /pattern/flags. This will resolve in Regex object

Methods on Regex object:

.test(string) -> boolean check if string has a match
.exec(string) -> array | null executes regex and returns array of matching groups
- array will include:
  - “0” - matched string
  - ”groups"
  - "index” - matched string index
  - ”input” - original string
- it acts as an iterator and, when there is no left matches it return null

regex flags(5 in-total, most important bellow):

g - search for all matches
i - case insensitive search

You don’t know JS book

I’ve also had many people tell me that they quoted some topic/explanation from these books during a job interview, and the interviewer told the candidate they were wrong; indeed, people have reportedly lost out on job offers as a result.

Naming and Spec

JavaScript is named after Java as branding for “web Java” and name still owned by Oracle JavaScript/JS has official name ECMAScript(ES) and it is also a standard for how to implement JS(browser, Node.js erc)

TC39 is tech committee that decides on new changes and later addresses them to ECMA

TC39 is managing open source proposals too
every proposal are gone gone through 0-4 stages

JS engines (ideally) fully implement JS spec Spec has appendix B that includes some historical inconsistencies in browser JS spec Some methods like alert, console.x, fs.write etc aren’t in spec, but universal-ish in JS environment

JS is muliy-paradigm lang

Updates

JS is backward compatible(new changes don’t break old code), but not forwardcompatiable(new changes can’t be run in old version)

HTML/CSS are opposite

To address forwardcompatiable problem transpiling(babel is most popular) invented

transpiling - converting new syntax to old one, like let -> var

Transpiling won’t help in new-new-API case, so dev can write polyfill(wrapper for new API that implemented with old APIs)

there are library of official polyfills
often babel can add polyfills

Interpretation

There two polar types of langs: interpreted and compiled, BUT it is not binary and rather a spectrum

interpretation works by executing code line by line
- any errors are throw in run time
compiling works by converting code to Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), analyzing for static(syntax, type etc) errors, then to binary code and then executed

JS has a parsing step and kinda compiled, but not fully

kinda, because after parsing it has conversion to optimized binary code(binary intermediate representation), that can be executed by virtual machine aka JS engine(similar to Java) JS also has Just-In-Time optimizations on BIR(post parsing)

WebAssembly(WASM)

In it’s core WASM is tool to convert some lang to binary representation of JS, that can be read by JS VM without need in additional optimizations

It is also suitable like general purpose VM

ironically it is hard to WASM to convert JS itself because of lack of type-safety :)

Strict

Optional(highly enforced in new code bases) list of additional rules to make JS safer and cleaner

best-practice is Strict + linter + prettier
de facto is default but technically not for backwardcompatability

some of strictness comes in form of new Static errors in strict this defaults to undefined

turned on with "use strict"; on first line per file

can be not on first line if there are comments/blank space above

ES6 modules enforces strict

Files

Each file is a program, but executions helps them to organically communicate, by mixing them in a runtime

it is done, so if one file throws, other will still operate Seamless communication is achieved via global scope, BUT after ES6, we can make files to be scoped(modular)

Values

primitive
- string - ordered collection of chars, can be defined with quotes(` ’ ”)
  - ` - doing interpolation on string, aka resolving some value into string
- boolean
- number
- bigint
- null
- undefined
- symbol - unguessable, uniq value, that can be used as object key
  - created by Symbol(“string”), BUT Symbol(“string”) !== Symbol(“string”)
objects
- array - special type of object for ordered, numerically indexed collection of items
- object - unordered, keyed collection of items with string keys

typeof tells type, BUT with some catch :)

typeof 42;                  // "number"
typeof "abc";               // "string"
typeof true;                // "boolean"
typeof undefined;           // "undefined"
typeof null;                // "object" -- oops, bug!
typeof { "a": 1 };          // "object"
typeof [1,2,3];             // "object"
typeof function hello(){};  // "function"

coercion is converting between types

value can be literal(declared in place) or stored in some var

Var, let, const

junior interview be like

	var	let	const	function
mutability	+	+	-*	-
block scoped	-	+	+	-
hoisting	+	-	-	+
* - if const is a pointer, it’s referenced value still can be changed, BUT it can be const via TS `as const`

Functions

We can call JS functions as procedure - collection of statements that can be invoked one or more times, that has output/input

function name(){} - function declaration, with name to func mapping on compile state
const name = function(){} - function expression(function is assigned to to var as expression), where function is associated with it’s name on runtime

JS functions are treated as values(or special type of Object) and can be passed around as in Functional Language

function in JS is first-class value

Func can receive 0-infinity parameter(local to function vars)

Func can be set as Object param

Comparisons

strict equality === - compare two values, without possibility of converting types
- type equality is always checked, but in === it is strictly must be the same
- NOTE
  - 3 === 3.0 // true
  - NaN === NaN // false
    - Number.isNan(NaN) // true
    - Object.is(NaN, NaN) // true
  - 0 === -0 // true
    - Object.is(0, -0) // false
  - {} === {} || [] === [] etc // false
    - because it is pointers comparison(opposite to structural equality, where we compare content)
- coercive comparisons OR loose equality == - compare two values, with converting to same type if possible
  - agreed to be dangerous to use
  - == and === do same value comparison
  - tend to do primitive numeric comparison
  - can’t be avoided, because > < >= <= are also coercive :)
    - two strings will resolve in dictionary-like comparison

Code Organization

classes
- class defines a “type” of custom data structure that includes data and behavior
- class is not a value, but value can be got from class via new aka class is instantiated
  - methods can be called only on instances
- inheritance is JS is done via extends + super(), so we can define common parent and extend it’s functional
- JS classes also have polymorphism, because they allow children classes to override existing methods
modules
- have same goal as classes to combine data with behavior, with additional possibility of module interactions
- Classic Modules
  - it is similar to classes, but we are creating a function, that incapsulates data and returns some object with methods to interact with data inside
    - factory pattern
- ES Modules
  - wrapping function is changed to wrapping file that incapsulates all data and exports all behaviors
  - we can say ESM is a singleton, caze it’s instance created on first import and after that other imports receive a reference

Iteration

It is important to have consistent method to work with large quantity of data, that’s why we have iterator pattern, that can iterate through some set of data and stop iterating at some point

there is next() method in JS, that returns object named iterator result, which consists of done: bool and value: any, where done indicates, that iteration of set is finished

for of is a syntax to consume iterators ... - spread and rest operator

SPREAD
- this form of operator is an iterator consumer
- we need some place to spread data into(array, function call)

iterator was created as base for iterable values aka value that can be iterated

iterator instance created from iterable on demand
string, array, map, set etc - iterable, so we can do smth like this:

const greeting = "Hello";
const chars = [ ...greeting ];

chars; // [ "H", "e", "l", "l", "o" ]

map has iterator that returns tuple value in a form of [key, value]
- .keys() gives us a list of keys
- .values() gives us a list of values
- .entries() gives us tuple, but for any iterable(for array it will be: [index, value])

Closures

Closure is when a function remembers and continues to access variables from outside its scope, even when the function is executed in a different scope.

objects don’t have closures, only functions

common closure use-case - async functions, when we close some data inside function, that is executed after some time, but still remembers data

This

Function has two characteristics:

scope - attached to function via closure, represents a list of static rules, that controls resolution of references and values. It is attached, when function is defined
- hidden inside JS engine
context - similar to scope, but attached on call stage and can be accessed via this. Context is dynamic and can differ from call to call
- object, that has properties, that made available for function
- this aware function - function, that depends on it’s context

if this aware func is called without strict mode, it will look to it’s context and then to global window object, in order to resolve value

WAYS TO MAKE THIS AWARE FUNCTION:

call function as object method -> this === object
function.call(obj, arg1, arg2) -> this === obj
function.apply(obj, [arg1, arg2]) -> this === obj
const f = function.bind(obj) -> this(inside f) === obj

classes are heavily based on this

Prototype

NOTE: JS is one of not many, who give access to direct object creating

this is characteristics of a function and prototype is characteristics of an object that helps to resolve property access

basically prototype is hidden link between two objects
prototype chain - series of objects linked via prototype
- it is called “behavior delegation”
prototype helps in delegation(inheritance) of methods
- by calling some method on current obj, JS will try to find it on this object first, than on it’s prototype in chain and return first occurrence || undefined

const newObj = Object.create(obj) - safe way to set newObj.prototype to obj

if obj is null, newObj will have no prototype(event Object.prototype)

this highly benefits from prototypes. It is dynamic in JS and can resolve from different objects. Example:

var homework = {
    study() {
        console.log(`Please study ${ this.topic }`);
    }
};

var jsHomework = Object.create(homework);
jsHomework.topic = "JS";
jsHomework.study(); // Please study JS

var mathHomework = Object.create(homework);
mathHomework.topic = "Math";
mathHomework.study(); // Please study Math

as we can see this.study resolves from homework, but this.topic still from object itself

Scope

Scope is well defined list of behavioural rules about variable and how engine interacts with them

Lexical scope model

scope is a block of code in which variable can be accessed
- can be nested
- variables from higher scope can be accessed, but not from lower
- how variables are placed determined at parsing/compiling stage

JS is has lexical scope model, BUT with some differences:

hoisting - variable can be declared at any place of scope, but treated as it is declared at beginning of it
var-declared - by declaring variable with var inside the scope it is accessible outside a block
temporal dead zone(TDZ) - by declaring variable with const/let there is a part of program, where you can try to call in-scope variable, but it is not accessible yet, because it is not declared
- result in ReferenceError

let x = 10;
if (true) {
 console.log(x); // ReferenceError: Cannot access ‘x’ before
 let x = 20; // decalre
}

Why JS Uniq

Prototype, Closure+Scope, Types+Type Equality

Values and References

In JS type determines if our variable will contain value or reference

Primitives are always passed as copies

Object values(like functions, arrays, objects) are stored as reference, so we can pass and copy the pointer, but not value itself

Function forms

We have function declaration and function expression(setting func to var)

Function expression can be done with anonymous function, BUT it and some other functions will still have .name property, reflecting declared OR variable name

mainly used for stack trace
function expression’s name will be "" if it is passed as an argument
function is still anonymous because it can’t refer to itself, .name is just metadata

We can also declare var with named function expression(name of var and func can be different, BUT .name will be from expression)

Generator function can be declared like this:

function *generator(){...}

Generator function - function with between-call state, that can finish it’s execution

main usage - write some iterable data structure example:

function *gen(){
  yield 1;
  yield 2;
}

const g = gen()
g.next() // {value: 1, done: false}
g.next() // {value: 2, done: false}
g.next() // {value: undefined, done: true}

gen().next() // {value: 1, done: false}

Also there are arrow functions, Immediately Invoked Function Expression(IIFE), async variations, class/object methods(not different from function in JS terms)

arrow functions are anonymous by design
key difference is that arrow function is referring to this from place it was declared AND NOT from place it was called, so it kinda closer to scope and perfect for callbacks inside methods

showSkills() {
    this.skills.forEach(function (skill) {
      console.log(`${this.name} is skilled in ${skill}`); // this.name === undefined
    });
  },

Coercive in conditionals

if, while, for, ? : have different from === or == comparison type, they are doing conversion to boolean each time, so:

// if("hello") === if(Boolean("hello") == true)

So we still meat coercive comparison, BUT in a way of just type transformation to boolean

Prototypal “Classes”

Aka classes before classes

It is old syntax, but classic for JS and it looks like this:

function A() {}

A.prototype.hi = () => console.log("hi");

const a = new A();
mathClass.hi(); // hi

It is possible, because all functions in JS refer to empty object as prototype, that will become prototype of objects, created from function via new

Practice 1

comparison
- str.slice("") can be changed with str.match(regex)
- "07:15" < "07:30" // true - example of valid string alphabetic comparison, that can be used to compare time, if time is in valid format

Code compiling

We can break compiling into 3 main stages:

tokenizing/lexing - breaking up string of chars into meaningful chunks(tokens)
- lexing is figuring if symbol is token itself or part of other token
parsing - converting list of tokens into Abstract Syntax Tree(AST)
code generating - different for every platform/language. For JS it is converting AST to machine instructions, that will execute

In-depth JS engine is deeper, because it has optimization(while compiling and on-fly), lazy comping etc

this is needed, because JS compilation needs to be seamless and fast, because we aren’t fully compiling like in C++

JS can be broken into compiling and execution, because of syntax errors, early errors and hoisting

to handle variables compilers break them into two types:

target(variable is a target if value is assigned to it)
- examples:
- const a = 53
- for (const a of aa)
- a(53) - assign 53 to some argument
- function a() {}
source(opposite to target)

Modifying scope on-fly

It is impossible to do this in strict mode and dangerous to say the least, but can be done with:

eval(string) - compiles and executes string inside as JS code at runtime, with modification to scope on-fly
- modifies scope, that eval was executed in
- BAD BECAUSE
  - code injection, unexpected behaviour, performance degradation(re-compilation on every function call)
with(obj) - turns object into function like scope, with properties converted to scoped vars
- BAD BECAUSE
  - readability, performance degradation(scope is dynamic, so dynamic re-compilation is present)

const obj = { a: "A" };

with (obj) {
    console.log(a); // A
}

Lexical scope

lexical scope is determined by placement of functions, blocks and variable declaration in relation to each other

var is associated with nearest function, but const/let with nearest block({})

variable must be available from current scope or lexically available/outside scope, otherwise usually error will occur

compilation don’t allocate memory or anything else with variable data, INSTEAD compilation create map of lexical scopes, so JS identify and not create a scope

Details

variable is always connected to scope, that it was created in, not the scopes it can be accessed
- properties are not vars, so they aren’t connected to scope
scope is fully contained in other scope, never split between two/more scopes
if we are referencing the value(not declaring it), JS performs a look up, trying to find our var in current/outer scope
- but it not performed at runtime, it mostly already known at that stage
var declaration like this var arr = []; can be seen as 2 step proses:
- Compiler sets declaration
- Engine looks up variable, initializes it and assigns variable
each scope will get new ScopeManager instance
- each scope has identifiers registered at the start of it(hoisting)
- each var in function scope will be associated with this function
var is always initialized at start of scope, but let/const - not

Lookup failures

Happens if no scope is left, but variable is still not found Different between strict/normal modes, as well as between role of var(source/target)

unresolved source always trows ReferenceError, but target will throw only in strict mode

often ReferenceError looks like this: Reference Error: XYZ is not defined. and means that var has no declaration

undefined often means that var was defined, but have no variable at the moment

NOTE: typeof empty declared and undeclared variable is always "undefined"
in non strict mode, if variable is target(we try to set it to something), it will be declared and set to that data in global scope

Scope Chain

Connection between scopes, which determines lookup path

Lookup process is kinda conceptual, because all metadata needed is determined during initial compilation

this information is immutable
this metadata stored in/near AST and used at runtime sometimes lookup is still needed, when scope can’t be determined at compilation
it happens when variable is declared in other file, that yet not processed, so such variables stay undetermined, until deferred lookup
- lookup failure still will happen, if scope is undetermined and variable referenced in execution

Shadowing

Basically having two same named variables, but in different scopes (one variable shadows other)

to consider, when shadowing, all inner scopes will loose access to shadowed variable to

un-shadowing(not recommended)

only way is through global/window object
- possible, because var, function declaration on global scope will create getter+setter on global object, that works as mirror to our variable
  - add property to global will also create variable in global scope

note

let always shadows var, but var can only be shadowed if it is inside function NOT a block
- otherwise - syntax error, because of hoisting
named function declaration const a = function b() {} will create not hoisting variable a in outer scope and var b in function’s inner scope
- b is always readOnly(in non strict mode, assignment will fail silently)
arrow function behaves similar to function expression scope-wise(even without {..})
- but remember, that it is anonymous by design

Two files, one program

Several files can be stitched together in this ways:

ES modules - each file loaded separately, all needed functions are imported as references to files
- no shared scope
Bundling - bundler concatenates all files into one
- usually each file is enclosed as one function, with exported methods as function methods, that can be accessed via shared scope(that also can contained in function, like “application” scope)
<script> - each JS file imported via script tag which is done with bundler or by hand
- files can be still concatenated, but without wrapper function, or they can be loaded in default way, where each file is independent, but they share global scope and communicate through it

Global Scope

Global scope is place to several modules to communicate

Also this is a place, where JS exposes it’s APIs, primitives, natives etc

also environment exposes it’s APIs(console, DOM etc)
- note: node has global scope, but it’s APIs technically not exposed there

Global scope is glue for JS apps, but not a dumpster field

Each JS environment handles global scope bit different

window
- function and var, declared on top level of an app, will appear on window object
- top level variables shadows any global scope variables(properties of window object)
- any DOM node with id will create global scope variable with the same name, which contains reference to this node
  - legacy behavior, not recommended to use
- window object has predefined name property, which is getter/setter and always a string
web workers - browser API, that allows to run JS in separate from main JS thread
- limited in browser APIs and have restricted communication with main thread, to avoid race conditions
- instead of window, web workers have self
- same var and function behavior
dev tools - process JS code in no-separate environment
- behaves differently and less strictly, in comparison to usual JS, to favor dev experience(DX)
  - some errors are relaxed and not displayed
  - behavior of global scope
  - hoisting
  - let/const in top level scope
- code is been executed in emulation of global scope
- not good enough to verify complex JS behavior
ES Modules(ESM)
- top level function and var won’t create any global property
  - we can imagine it in a way, that all our code is wrapped in a function, so we can access global global scope, but not in a classical JS way
- all communication with outer files are done via import/export
Node
- Node treats all files as modules(ESM or CommonJS)
  - top level of file is never affects a global scope
  - all code is wrapped in function, that exposes some APIs to it(like parameters)
  - to assign global property Node exposes global object, that is reference to real global scope

global scope object can be get with

const glob = (new Function("return this"))();

function can be constructed from string and run in non-strict mode
- this of such function will be global object reference

globalThis is introduced as standardized universal variable, that will always reference environment’s global scope object

not completely useful, because of old versions in-compatibility

Hoisting

function declaration and var variables can be accessed from beginning of function scope due to hoisting

note, function hoisting includes function initializing and setting a reference to a function, BUT var create an undefined placeholder and later fills it with data
to be specific, let/const also hoist to top of block scope, but they have TDZ of unusability

hoisting happens at compile time, where functions are hoisted first and then variables

Re-Declaration

re-declaration of var variables will do nothing, if we aren’t explicitly setting new value

with let/const re-declaration is not allowed and will throw SyntaxError

even if re-declaration uses var it will still throw
it has no technical reasons to be so, just stylistic

note, re-declaration is not happening in loops, because:

each loop iteration creates a new, clean scope
var will hoist out of loop and be just re-assignment
it also true for for loops, we can conceptually say that i is declared per loop, but program keeps track of current i value via other scoped variable like this:
- note, it won’t work with const, if you will re-assign i

{
    let _i = 0;

    for (; _i < 3; _i++) {
        let i = $$i;
        ...
    }
}

Const

empty const declaration will throw SyntaxError, because re-assignment is impossible and will cause TypeError

important that re-assignment will throw a run-time error

TDZ

Means that variable is exists, but not initialized, so we can’t use it, event if we try to declare them like this:

a = "a"

let a;

happens, because compiler is instructed to initialize variable on line 3

if function referencing variable and called before it’s initialization, ReferenceError will be thrown

good practice to put const/let as high as possible in block to avoid TDZ

Scope Exposure

It is good practice to lower scope exposure and make program functions with least amount of open data to make it more secure

It is bad idea to use global scope only because of:

name collisions
unexpected behavior(it is generally bad to expose private function, because it may be used unpredictable)
dependency problem(others may depend on your private API and any change may cause big refactor)

Scoping with functions

We can limit scope via IIFE(Immediately Invoked Function Expression), so it be block-like, but also working for var/function

note: IIFE must always be surrounded with ()
continue/break won’t work inside IIFE for outer loop
this is re-binded inside IIFE

Scoping with blocks

{} will create a block, but scope will be created only if some variable is declared inside

object literals aren’t blocks
class declaration
function body is a statement with function scope
switch declaration

catch is block+scope, with block scoped parameter, which is optional

function declaration inside block is block scoped by TC39, BUT in browser environment it will be function scoped, with initialization on block execution(so undefined by default)

this leads to conditional function definition :)

if (a) {
    function b() {
        console.log("a is true");
    }
}
else {
    function b() {
        console.log("a is false");
    }
}

Closure

only relevant to functions/class methods
function must be invoked in different scope
based on lexical scope, but observable at a runtime

we can say that closure is reference from inside of a function to variables, from different scope(basically function is enclosing that variables)

closures are also created for pointer functions
closure is not a snapshot, but editable

interesting point, that by using var declaration for i we are getting shared enclosed i, so it will be equal in all closures, BUT with let we will have separate, re-declared variables

common usages

async
callbacks
handlers
remember some information, by computing it once and enclosing
partial implementation
currying

in theory we can say, that there is no need to enclose global scoped variables, unused variables etc as optimisation matter

but there is need to account for eval() etc

alternatively view to closure is that our function is stays in place, and reference to it is passed, so enclosed variables are just simply accessed by function

Closure lifetime

It is important that closure can cause memory leeks, because garbage collector can’t pick up variable, that been closed over

good practices:

always unsubscribe event listeners/other cb based functions
manually unset variables(set to null to discard some large objects), that are not needed anymore(not really practical, but can be useful in some optimizations)

Module pattern

main way to organize code in JS is to break code into small, independent modules, that encapsulate some data/private methods and expose public

basically module is just a collection of data, private/public functions

types:

namespace - group some independent(by state and purpose) functions together, in common namespace, like “utils”
data structure - group data and functions together, without access control
modules - data + functions + access control, but it is a singleton by design
module factory - function, that creates modules
OTHER
- CommonJS - module, that created on per-file basic
  - public API is added via assigning something to module.exports object
  - module can be imported with const obj = require("path")
    - if "path" is not absolute, Node will try to look at node_modules folder and assume, that file has js type
- ESM - module, per-file basic. Similar to CommonJS, but always in strict mode
  - import/export keywords are used to import/export APIs
    - export
      - must be on top level scope
      - can be placed before variable declaration
      - via export default we can make imports easier(no need to de-construct APIs from object)
        
        non-default exports are named as “named exports”
    - import
      - only top level scope
      - ”named” export can be re-named with as
      - ”namespace” import is done like this: import * as A from ... and allows to collect every named export into some object’s properties

Scope deep dive

non obvious scopes:

function parameters scope
- simple parameters won’t create their own scope, but: default values, rest parameters and destructed parameters - will, some examples and corner cases:
  - function k(b = a, a) will cause TDZ error
  - function k(a, b = () => a) will create parameter and function scope(for default value a)
  - var will initialize to function parameter value and not undefinde
    - so it is not recommended to shadow parameters
function name scope
- if we declare function like this: const a = function k()..., function name k will create it’s own scope, “between” a and k, so we can still shadow it

Functions naming

Naming functions is good for:

stack trace debugging
self referencing(recursion, un-subscribing from something)
easier to read but can make code uglier, because arrow function are always anonymous :(

NOTE: don’t make any scene if any additional code processing is used

function is not named, when it is passed as value to some variable, or object method

to be sure, function won’t have real name, rather it will take name of method/variable name, so it’s name will be “inferred”
- this won’t give function a name: config.a = function(){}

hack to name IIFEs - name by purpose, that is usually to wrap some data, so: StoreSomeData

main way to define IIFE is to: wrap it in (), use +, !, ~(it will work as (), by making JS engine evaluate function), or use explicit void operator, that evaluates and returns undefined

TDZ origin

TDZ originates from const, because:

it is strange to first part of block be shadowed and other part not, so we need to hoist our const declaration to top
we can’t auto-init const to undefined, because it won’t be constant

let got TDZ behavior to be similar to const

Callbacks

async - some function(part of code), that was suspended and will be invoked later
sync - some function, that passed as reference to be immediately invoked in other part of program
- base for
  - Dependency Injection(DI) - passing some dependency(functionality) from one part of program to other, so it can perform some actions(example: map iterate, but it don’t know what to do)
  - Inversion of Control(IoC) - control from current part of program handed to other part(map controls invocation of some logic)
    - based on that, we can say that we invoke libraries functions and framework invokes our functions

we can say, that any callback is an IIFE, because it is declared in place and invoked, there for there is no need to IIFE to have any closure(it will rely on lexical scope)

note: it is just one way to represent callbacks

More about Modules

Most classic modules just return object, that represents their public API, but it might be useful to declare some publicApi object, to save reference to public API inside module and only later return it

problem arrives, because we depend on hoisting here

Asynchronous Module Definition(AMD) - variation to define classic module, presented in RequireJS(library for in-browser/Node module loading) and looks like this:

define([ "./A" ],function Afactory(A){
    return { ... };
});

Universal Modules(UMD) - module, that uses collection of formats, so we can seamlessly load modules in browser, Node or via AMD

basically just an IIFE, but with additional if..else to detect format

Objects

NOT Everything in JS is an object, but object is still a key part in JS, because it is based on prototypes, which, in combination with this, makes possible class pattern

Object can be represented as key/value container(array is sub-type, with index keys)

“key” === “property name"
"key+value” === “property”

note: {} are used for many ways:

define object
destruct object
string interpolation
define blocks
define function body

all object values are immediately calculated, before assignment, there is no lazy values in JS

object is similar to JSON(JavaScript Object Notation), but in JSON we must wrap keys in "" and values are primitives/arrays, with no trailing comas, comments etc

all object keys are converted to strings, except numbers, or “number”(example: "37"), which treated like indexes

if you need to use value as key as is, use Map
key can be computed, by surrounding it with []
Symbol can be used as key - uniq(in program scope) value, that prevents monkey patching and collisions
- often used for some inner properties, that won’t be exposed

function can be added to property in this ways:

const a = {
  a: function(){},
  b(){}
  *c(){}
  ["oh my, " + "new way to sheetcode :)"](){}
}

... - technically syntax, but acts like an operator and called obect spread

it assigning key/value pares from one object to another, without deep copy
- only owned an enumerable properties
if object has property duplication, this property will be overwritten top->bottom, so only last value will stay
deep copy is tricky, because of: reference to function, reference to external object(DOM Element), nested objects, so main approaches are:
- use external lib, with predefined behavior
- use JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(obj)), but it won’t work for: functions(un-serializable data), circular references
- structuredClone(obj), provided by environment, can’t handle DOM and function cases

accessing properties is done via obj. or obj[computed val, converted to str]

object can be destructed(values from object are assigned to created variables in specified way(with renaming, default values))

const { a: ab = "37" } = A;

but, we can destruct without declaration, like this:

let a;
({ a: a } = A);

after ES20 conditional property access was added via ?. operator, which checks if left value is nullish or not(nullish -> return undefined, non-nullish -> return value of property)

it is appropriate to use, where you don’t know if the value is exists, to avoid run-time errors
we can also conditionally get data from arrays like this: matrix[37]?.[0]
function call can be conditional to, with: a.func?.(), BUT it won’t check if func is real function, so exception may be thrown anyway

non-object value’s properties can be accessed, because JS performs “boxing” on it(temporary wraps value inside object, for example: 37.toString() -> Number(37).toString())

we can manually box null/undefined, with Object(null)
JS can also unbox in cases like: Number(37) + 40 -> 37 + 40

assignment is done via =, but it can lead to some setter function under the hood

delete obj.a will delete a property from obj, BUT not free memory

will throw in strict mode with non object property
not equal to assigning undefinded

we can use object as temporary containers, to pass many arguments to function, but never access created object, because we always destruct properties

all underlying behavior of object is described by metaobject protocol, that can help understand objects deeper and change it’s behavior if needed

Object APIs

Object.entries(obj) -> [[key, val], [key, val]] - take entries from object
- only owned an enumerable properties
- similar to Object.keys(obj) -> Array, Object.values(obj) -> Array
Object.getOwnPropertyNames(obj) -> Array - returns keys for enumerable and non-enumerable properties, BUT no Symbol properties
- to get Symbol properties, use Object.getOwnPropertySymbols(obj) -> Array
- note: both getters will return owned properties, no prototype inherited
Object.fromEntries([[key, val], [key, val]]) -> obj - construct object from entries
Object.assign(targetObj, obj1, obj2 ... objn) - swallow copies properties from one object to other
"property" in obj -> boolean - checks if object or it’s prototype chain have property
- NOTE: for in will also traverse through prototype chain, but skip Symbols
obj.hasOwnProperty() -> boolean - checks if object have property
- same, but less preferable variation of Object.hasOwn(obj, property) -> boolean

Property Descriptors

each property has description, in a form of object

can be get via Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(obj, "a"); can be set via Object.defineProperty(obj, "a", {});

will also define a new property
we can batch definitions like this

Object.defineProperty(obj, {
  a: {},
  b: {}
});

contains:

value: any
- instead of value we can define get() and set(val) functions
enumerable: boolean (true by default) // marks if property should appear in .entries(), for...in etc
writable: boolean (true by default) // controls if value can be changed via =, but not via .defineProperty()
configurable: boolean (true by default) // (dis)allows re-defining descriptor, but value can be still changed with =

any property duplication is just value duplication, not full descriptor

Sub-types of Objects

Sub-type of objects is and object, that extends basic behavior

Array - numerically indexed object
- note: we can still assign named properties to it, but we shouldn’t
- length is always exposed, updated property on array-object
  - it is not computed every time it’s called, so we can safely call it any time we need, not worry about optimization
  - it is also can be set
- if you skip values, when assigning to array, it won’t create undefined values in between, which return undefined, but skipped over, when .map is called
Function - callable objects
- function has two exposed properties:
  - name - used for stack tracing
  - length - number of explicitly defined parameters, but not parameters, with default value

Object characteristics

extensible - define if new properties can be added to object
- true by default, but can be set to false via Object.preventExtensions(obj);
- will throw run time exception is strict
sealed - change some parameters of object:
- remove possibility to add properties, remove properties, re-configure properties
- prototype can’t be re-assigned
- values of properties can be set
- can be set by Object.seal()
frozen - same as sealed, but without value changing too
- can be set by Object.freeze()
- potentially slow

Prototype chaining

All objects, from creation, has [[Prototype]] property, that points to other object

by default, all object are linked to Object.prototype

this technic delegates the access of some properties to linked object up to chain, until we reach to final object(null) or find property

this technic is called “prototype inheritance” or “prototype delegation” and properties are “inherited”

to create object with different prototype we can use const a = Object.create(obj);

it takes second argument, like Object.defineProperties(), but it’s not commonly used
alternately we can use __proto__ syntax, BUT it not in TC39 spec, but in Appendix B

const a = {
  __proto__: obj,
  a: 37
};

dictionary object - object with null prototype

.prototype - is property on all function-objects, that points to an object, that will be set to [[Prototype]] of a created object from this function
- don’t forget, that function itself will have [[Prototype]], inherited from Function.prototype

OOP 101

OOP is mainly about breaking program into meaningful entities that can inherit and interact with each other in some way

basically, if you program need some data+behavior object instances, class is a way to go
- note: if you are creating classes and don’t initializing them(just inherit from), maybe you don’t need this class

Encapsulation helps to hide some details and expose useful abstractions

Instead of inheritance, composition can be used to declare classes, based on other classes combination

Class

Prio to ES6 JS main class approach was prototypal classes. In ES6 classes was introduced as syntactic sugar and later evolved from it to separate thing, but it is still based on prototype chaining

we can create class via declaration OR expression, like function

it can be anonymous too
all code inside class is in “strict” mode

class can have:

methods
- special method is constructor, which can be empty(will be default constructor) or declared and called on every creation of class instance via new
variables

type of class is a function, but it can be only called with new(otherwise TypeError) and can be serialized to string

basically our class is a constructor function, that vires it’s constructor to all it’s instances
we can call all class methods like this Class.prototype.method, or declare them as static

this is used to reference current instance context for all methods inside context

often we use it to declare some data, BUT all values can be just placed inside of our class, like this:

class A {
  x = 10
  y = this.x * 10
}

note: never declare methods like this: a = () => {}, because it will create new instance of a function for every object instance AND will break this bindings
- closure is more appropriate for such cases

extend is used to chain classes

in this situation this is shining, caze it will refer methods/variables in context it called and not created
we can override methods in extended classes, BUT it is still possible to access “parents” methods, by calling super.
- this helps implementing “method polymorphism” pattern
- note: super() must be invoked in a constructor to invoke inherited constructor AND this must be done before any this reference, or runtime exception will be thrown
  - BUT, default constructor invoking super() by itself
  - any initialization of “public” variables are done after super()
- there is new.target property, that is equal to class itself, if we are initing it via new
  - with a help of this we can restrict use of constructor by explicitly throwing and there for making our class abstract

instance of helps find out if our instance created from some class, BUT it also will result in true for inherited classes, because it is performing prototype check and traverse

it can be also check like this: A.prototype.isPrototypeOf(a) -> boolean
if direct check is needed, we can use: a.constructor === A
- .constructor is located on A prototype

Static properties

For better code organisation we can use “static” values/methods, that will be placed(there for associated) on class, but will be accessible via class itself and not it’s instance

it means that in JS we can store methods in 3 places: constructor, instance, class function
we can create class instance and place it into static property
this. inside static equals to Class.
- we can(but shouldn’t) do this: static a = new this()
we can use static blocks to define some temp values or do try/catch computations like this: static {...}
static methods are inherited in same way as default methods, but as static
- note: it is still done via prototype linkage, but we are changing link from Funtion.prototype to Class.prototype
  - this isn’t possible to do via pre-ES6 classes

static initialization

happens immediately after class definition
happens in order, one-by-one

Private properties

JS has native private properties(don’t mix-up with TS’s private, public, protected), that is defined like this: #a = ..., and can be applied to all other types of properties. To access private properties use: this.#a

main problem - we can’t access private properties when extending class, so they are not fully useful
- but we still can access private properties via super
we can add private fields only via class body, can re-assigne, but not delete them
- JS will throw, if we try to access private field
  - we can use try/catch or check via in to avoid unhandled exception

This

key differences in JS:

this is runtime value(usually object), that can’t be determined at compilation stage
this can be different, depending on how function is invoked
we can think about this in a way - this is some variable, that takes some value, when function is invoked
- basically this is some placeholder, that change behavior of function
- it’s always important to remember, that this can be controlled from outside on function call, so we need to know context to fully understand how function behaves
- this acts like implicit parameter, meaning we aren’t defining it and not declaring, that we will use it, and just use it
  - often this is not properly validated too(thank god for TS :) )

overall this acts like dynamic context for function, that was called inside of it

ways to invoke this-aware function:

implicit context invocation - invoke function, that is object’s method
- this === object
- example: printerInstance.print()
default context invocation - invoke function, without any context
- this is depends on some other factors, but often it will be equal to globalThis, BUT in “strict” mode this === undefined, so we will get run-time error
explicit context invocation - invoke function, with passing context to it
- this === firstArgument
- examples:
  - a.apply(context, [val1, val2])
  - a.call(context, val1, val2)
- we can borrow methods from one objects and utilize them in other context like this: obj1.a.call(obj2)
  - we can share a function reference between multiple objects as alternative
new context invocation - invoke function with new keyword
- JS is doing some steps here:
  - create new object
  - link function.prototype to object’s __prototype__
  - invoke function with new context
  - return(if not function explicitly return object) this object
- basically we can create object instances from “classes” this way note: JS is checking this rules on-by-one and first rule to hit will determine this value(ordered from last to first as written before)

THIS ALL IMPLIES TO METHOD OR FUNCTION, BUT NOT FOR…

This in arrow function

Main problem with this comes in places, where we need to pass our function somewhere else, but we still rely on current context. We can’t control context, so we either copy this and save via scope(our function is no longer this-aware) OR use arrow functions

arrow function presents a possibility to use “lexical this” pattern, so any this inside arrow function refers to context, function was created, and NOT dynamic context
this means, that this in any arrow function is just a simple keyword, that is using possibilities of lexical scope
- note: now it not matters how function was called, but where it was created(but we still care how surrounding function was called)

notes:

we can still call/apply on arrow function, but it will have no effect
if arrow function have no this in it’s/outer scope, this will result in {}
this will take value of first occurrence, so even if function doesn’t have any defined this it still has default context, so this in arrow function resolves to globalThis
alternative to arrow function - .bind(context) function method, that defines new function, with fixed context
- we are doing “hard binding”
- bounded function can loose it’s bind, when called with new
  - arrow function can’t and will throw, if called with new

remember: binding or creating arrow function takes some memory(this memory can’t be cleaned too, if we didn’t unsubscribed), so it is important to be careful with this

This corner cases

Worse to mention, that this resolves to globalThis, when we invoking our function indirectly, for example:

(1, a.do)(3, 7); - evaluates expression and indirectly invokes function
(() => a.do)()(3, 7);
any IIFE variation exception:
(a.do)(3, 7), because it resolves into a.do(3, 7)

this corner cases suffer from “strict” mode, caze globalThis in default context is undefined, BUT creating function with new Function(string) will create non “strict” functions, that ALWAYS resolve this to globalThis, so we can get reliable polyfill: const t = new Function("return this")();

but, often such hack is broken by browser’s Content-Security-Policy (CSP), that prevent dynamic code evaluation
- but, we still can get globalThis, because spec guarantees, that in both modes this resolves in globalThis for getters, defined on properties of global objects

other case, we can call template tag function(function is been called with such syntax:

function someFunction(){}

someFunction`string`;

this will have same evaluation as for default functions, but without new, call/apply, because it is not possible to call function in this way

via this functions we can work with and parse in specific way templated strings, consider this example:

function a(...args) { console.log(...args); }
const b = 123;

a`hello ${1} world ${b}`;
// clg: [ 'hello ', ' world ', '' ] 1 123

Delegation in JS

All we have are objects, linked to and cooperating with other objects.

Delegation is about multiple things working together to complete some task It is not mainstream pattern in JS and lies somewhere in between OOP’s class inheritance and object modules

in classes we have some parent that represents behavior(class) and children that inherits from it
in delegation we have equal peers, that cooperate with each other
- via delegation we can achieve virtual composition by calling some predefined functions with any context and there for composing behavior of some object at a run-time and not composing a class, that will give it’s behavior to instance
- we can achieve flexibility by calling methods with this, but not declaring this on current object(so we can delegate execution to other context)
  - fils a bit stinky to me :)
- we can use this context or pass context directly to achieve delegation
constructor is an initializator for our instance, but it’s creation is happening via new
- we can re-implement class with constructor as function factory, that do same things(create object, link prototype, init and return)
  - note: it is bad to call factory with new caze we basically create and throw away on object under the hood
  - we can delegate initialization from our factory to object init method(or smth like this) and there for need in factory is vanished(case create, link and init can be done with Object.create(baseProptotype) + obj.init())
  - in this way we can move from vertical class based inheritance to other ideas as mixins etc

Primitives

Again, not everything in JS is an object, some of them are primitive values Note: value has type, rather than variable

all primitives:

undefined
- acts as an empty value and placeholder for empty places
null
- typeof results in an object for legacy reasons
boolean
number
bigint
symbol
string this is a string values, that typeof will return for different primitives(when called on value or variable)
typeof will also return undefined for non-existing variables without throwing

key difference is that primitives don’t have properties

all properties like .toString() or .length come from auto-boxing

Null’ish

generally an empty values, like null or undefined

logically null and undefined mean the same, so it is kinda matter of preference in choosing one/another
- but it is important to be careful, case JS can behave differently, for example:
  - function a(a = "a") return a; a(null) => null
in coercive comparison null equals to undefined, BUT not to other falsy values
- as well we have ?? nullish-coalescing operator, that similar to ||, but will choose first value even if it is falsy, but not null’ish

Boolean

representing two values: true | false, or more properly 1 | 0

used for most logic handling

can be flipped via !

String

String is a collection of one or more characters, that enclosed in ` or ’ or ” from both sides

All strings have “property” length that represents number of actual character(unicode warning) in it

unicode 101

unicode represent all characters that can be represent with number from 0 to 10FFFF, usually in U+(4-6 hex numbers) notation
there are different types of unicode(8, 16, 32)
first 65.535 characters are stored as 2-byte UTF-16 character, for other characters more space is needed, so they stored as surrogate pairs(basically two 2-byte characters)
- this pairs are meaningful only in pair an rear alone
there are graphemes - unicode characters that looks like one symbol, but may be combined from many code-points(👩‍👩‍👦‍👦 === 7 adjacent code-points)
- underlying code-points are meaningful code-points

escaping strings

’ and ” quotes represent string as-is, except for special \ escaped symbols:
- full list: b, f, n, r, t, v, 0, ', "
  - in other cases \ is just dropped
- additionally we have multi character escapes
- \u(4 hex digits) - represent Unicode BMP characters
  - additionally unicode can be represented like two pairs or like this: \u{...}
    - note: \u{...} is same as unicode pair and both cases have length of 2
  - also some BMP characters can be represented as pair of basic and symbol character
    - example: é
    - such symbol is named combining part an makes sense in pair with letter
    - note: if we are using BMP notation length will be 1 and for surrogate pair it will be 2 + we will have false comparison
      - it cases some corner cases like this to: "é" === "é"; // false
  - JS has str.normalize(method) to normalize unicode to some state
    - "NFC" - combines several code-points into composed one
    - "NFD" - opposite one
    - also there is cases for letters with several special symbols, that will resolve in 3->1 code-points change
    - normalization won’t proper work for graphemes, caze they are combination of valid code-points
- \x(2 hex digits) - represent ASCII character
  - "a" === "\x61"; // true
- we can also break strings into separate lines in code, but not in string like this:
  - such syntax is often called as multi-line, but, to be fair, it is just syntax and not real multi-line

const a = "Hello \
World!";

console.log(a); // Hello World!

` strings(template literals / interpolate strings) work the same as default string, but with some additions:
- parsing of ${} values, with evaluation and interpolation of value inside of it to string
  - we can put some value or even complex JS code, including other template literals…so presenting advanced JS code, never seen before:

const main = `${(function () {
  console.log("I am inside a string!");
})()}`;

- multi-line strings - template literals indeed can be multiline, but new lines are part of string(they still can be escaped as for default strings)
- template literals can be tagged(passed to function as shown before)
  - this means that tagged template literal can resolve in any value(untagged only in string)
- we can’t use such strings for:
  - “use strict”
  - property names
  - destruction patterns
  - import..from

Number

JS numbers are 64-bit floating point signed numbers

int string -> int conversion JS differs methods to parsing and coercion types:

parsing:
- extract number from string, even if there is some non numeric characters
  - note: parsing is done only on string values, so other values will be converted to string, there for parseInt(float) is worse than just Math.floor
  - both parsers try to find numeric characters in string and stop, when they find non-number
    - if first character is non-numeric, we will get NaN
    - . is non-number for parseInt
- examples:
  - parseInt(string, radix) -> number
    - radix is number(2-36) that represents base to parse number from
      - incorrect radix results in NaN
      - omitting radix makes JS try to guess base of a number by first digit(s)
      - str.toString(radix?) can work with radix to convert number to some base
  - parseFloat(string) -> number
    - radix is always 10
    - can parse scientific notation, but parseInt can’t
coercion:
- try fully extract number from string or fail with NaN
- done with: Number or +

all numbers in JS are in base-10(under the hood to), but there are other notations(case insensitive):

binary: 0b111
octal: 0o37
hexadecimal: 0x2a
scientific: 3.7e1 or 3.7e+1 or 3.7e-1
- - and - are different and makes floating point go right or left
- basically it is specifying some number in power of 10
- very large/small(21 digit of persision) number are converted to string as scientific notations
  - 123 ** 11 -> “9.748913698143826e+22”
  - 123 ** -11 -> “1.0257553107587752e-23”
- scientific notation strings can be got via number.toExponential(precision) -> string, where precision - number of decimal digits

JS allows to notate numbers with _, for readability reasons, like this: 12_345, which equals to 12345

JS has a max number, that exposed via Number.MAX_VALUE // 1.7976931348623157e+308, which is an integer and is around (2^1024)-1

we can’t have values higher then this, except of Infinity
- note: we can’t get Infinity by adding to this number some small number, but it is possible to overflow and get Infinity with some arithmetic
  - it is one way rule and Infinity can resolve in some number
there is another variant of max number, Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER // 9007199254740991 == (2 ^ 53) - 1, that is much smaller that original max value
- over this number arithmetics falls down and become unpredictable
Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER is negative of max safe
- or 0 :)

JS has a min number(not negative, but closest to zero), that is exposed via Number.MIN_VALUE and can be different by JS spec

there is -0 in JS, that is === to 0, but not Object.is

it comes from IEEE-754 and kinda hidden in JS
could be useful to track 2D velocity+direction
it is not a thing for bigint

APIs:

Number.isInteger(number) -> boolean
Number.isFinite(number) -> boolean
Number.isSafeInteger(number) -> boolean

IEEE-754 101

It is a standard for representing numbers in binary JS uses double-precision variation of it(64-bit)

52 bits for number - mantissa
- this value is multiplied to (2 ^ exponent) for final result
11 bits for exponenta(2 ^ exponent)
- we always extract 1023 from mantissa, caze it is shifted
1 bit - sign
- 1 for negative so we have 2^64 - 2^53 + 3 signed numbers

bits are placed like this: “SEE…EMMM…M”

floating point comes from the fact, that decimal points “float” along the bits, so close values can have very different notation

this standard is also reserves values for:

+-Infinity
-0
NaN // thats why JS treats NaN as number

NaN

Not a Number - result of failed conversion or math operation(number divide by string)

+undefined -> NaN

note:

NaN === NaN // false
Number.isNaN(NaN) // true
- it is superior to global isNaN caze global one converts non-numeric values to number first, so string will become NaN, there for check will be successful
Object.is(NaN, NaN) // true
[NaN].includes(NaN) // true

BigInt

Allows to store big values(commonly 64-bit IDs) with no theoretical limit(depends on implementation and computation resources)

bigints in JS have n postfix like this: 37n

this postfix is purely syntactic
we can perform same arithmetic operations on them, but it is restricted to number-number or bigint-bigint, no mixing
can be converted from number/string(coercive) via BigInt(number|string)
- n is note allowed to be in string

Symbol

Symbol is a special value, that can be created via Symbol(string) -> symbol

any value passed in constructor is for debugging purposes only
it is impossible to inspect underlines of the symbol
- engine will never expose it, but it is known that some engines might just use incrementing number strategy(like numeric IDs in DB)
characteristics
- unguessable
- won’t repeat in scope of program

use-cases

check if variable renamed unchanged
set “private” object methods
- they are still visible, but kinda set apart + non-enumerable
- we can compare symbols with “mark as private” notation of _

well known symbols - some symbols that represent some meta-properties and left public(as property on Symbol) to some manipulation:

String(obj); // [object Object]

obj[Symbol.toStringTag] = "123";

String(obj); // [object 123]

other WKS:

.iterator - symbol that stores iterator implementation
.toPrimitive - allow to override ToPrimitive bahvior
- [Symbol.toPrimitive](hint) {...}

JS has built in global symbols management system, so we won’t need to cary them around. API:

const symb = Symbol.for("37"); // retrieve OR create new

const symbKey = Symbol.keyFor(symb); // "37"

const symb2 = Symbol.for(symbKey);

symb === symb2 // true

we treat symbols as primitives, BUT worse mentioning that they have specified prototype(by spec) and kinda unuq as object reference

Dive into primitives

All JS primitives are immutable(you can change value of variable, create new values, BUT not mutate value itself)

note: strings are read-only, so even if look like char[], they are not. Operations like this(assigning to read-only property) "123"[0] = 9 will silently fail/throw
const is never affects value mutability
- writable: false on property has same effect

primitives allow property access(except null, undefined). Also we can write properties, but with now change(silent failure)

note: everything bellow is facilitated by auto-boxing
some properties are exposed by default, like .length for strings. It is read-only and show number of code-points in a string
also primitives have standard or special for some type exposed properties/methods, like:
- .toString() -> string
- .valueOf() -> any

primitive assignment and passing is always by copy

Strings

strings are not arrays, but they:

allow access to chars via [index], where index is coerced to a number(or NaN thus resulting in undefined)
allow array like iteration

length computation:

each code-unit in JS is 16bit value
it is better to use "NFC" normalization to make result closer to visual length of string
to deal with surrogate pairs we can use [...string].length hack, that will break string not by surrogate, but by pair
- won’t work for combined code-points

i18n and i10n

JS has ability to detect context in which it is running and adjust its behavior with string, dates, numbers etc
- character itself can have some special behavior to it
- to force some behavior we have Intl API
  - .Colorator("lang code", options) - create instance of helper, that force language behavior and have methods like .compare
  - .Segmentor("lang code", options) - creates instance of helper, that takes a string and return an iterator over some part of string(words etc, with respect to language)
- examples:
  - changing direction of chars in string (on rendering stage)

equality

any equality check is case sensitive(if it makes sense for such char)
- normalization can be done via .toUpperCase() or .toLowerCase()
types:
- string equality - check if two strings are exactly equal
  - == or === or Object.is
- relational comparison - compare if one string “larger”/“smaller” than other
  - > or < or >= or <=
    - interestingly JS doesn’t specify > and >= it just uses revers variation of <= and < respectively
  - it is done by performing lexicographical comparison(like in a dictionary, by alphabet)
    - locale based
      - to enforce some locale we can use str.localeCompare(str, lang, options) -> 0|1|-1
        
        Intl.Colorator is more efficient for same task
    - always coercive
    - this results in such cases: "11" > "100" /// true

concatenation

in JS string concatenation is done via +, but usually it is clearer to just use template strings
for variable string size we can use:
- str.concat(str1, ...)
- [str1, str2, ...].join("separator")

API

String.raw'...' - default template tag function, that prevents character escape

Number

While working with numbers it is important to remember about IEEE-754 floating point imprecision, famous: 0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3000...004 to deal with it:

we can use Number.EPSILON, that basically just a small number, that, in theory, should be less, than such imprecision errors
- in practice it is no a deal, so we can scale EPSILON or use other approaches
convert floating numbers to number/biging, operate with them and convert back on output
use external libs
don’t use IEEE-754 based environment

comparison - numbers are always compared as binary values under the hood and not literal representations, so base notation doesn’t matter

JS doesn’t differ between 37, 37.0, 37.0000 etc
remember that: -0 === 0 // true and NaN === NaN // false
- Object.is avoids this problems

math operations

+, -, *, /, ** // exponentiation, % // modulo
- + is overloaded, so if one of operand is string, we will have string coercion and concatenation
- all operations have += like short-hand
- all this operations are binary, so expect number(or try to do coercion to it) on both sides
- + and - can be used in unary form, meaning with one operand like this: +37
  - interestingly, JS syntax doesn’t allow to have negative numbers, so -42 will be ready as positive 42 negatived by minus sign
  - we can put any number of whitespaces(tab, space, new line) between operator an operand
++ and -- - increment and decrement operators, that are unary and except only one valid number and do += 1 to it
- there is a behavior difference between position of this operator(before or after operand)
BITWISE - bit-level operations
- flow: convert operand to 32-bit signed int, do bit manipulation, convert back to IEEE-754 representation
- all bitwise have += like short-hand
- & - AND
- | - OR
  - can be used to truncate decimal part AKA convert to int
- ^ - XOR(eXclusive OR) - true if both different
- ~ - NOT - unary operator
  - basically: ~x === -(x + 1)
- operand << number - shift operand’s bits to left to number positions
- >> - right shift, with sign preservation
- >>> - right shift, without sign preservation

.property on number value can case exception, if there is no dot in it(can be whitespaced, boxed or put into () to avoid exception)

we can see that 37..property is legal, case 37. syntax itself is legit
bigint won’t suffer from it, caze no decimals

interestingly we can find NaN, Infinity, -Infinity as static properties on Number object

for math purposes JS exposes Math object with constants and static helpers

Math.random is disregarded as been unsafe for pseudo random number generator(PRNG)
- as alternative we have crypto.getRandomValues() API

bigint <-> number

float -> bigint will throw
NaN | Infinity -> bigint will throw
too big bigint -> Infinity

Objects

object as a type has several sub-types with uniq behaviors. but overall they all just act as collection of properties with some values:

plain object
- usually defined via {} or new Object(prototype)
- acts as collection of named properties with values(any primitive or object)
- __proto__ is linked to Object.prototype, so they have delegation access to some methods
boxed primitives(fundamental objects)
- instances of various built-in constructors
- String, Number, Boolean etc
- by calling Obj(value) we performing coercion, but when calling it with new we are getting instance, that wraps a primitive value inside of it
  - it is a bad practice to use new, caze plain primitives are more reliable and optimized. Also typeof will be "object" for such instances
  - Symbol and BigInt are “constructor” sub-type, which means they can’t be used with new and will always produce plain value
  - auto-boxing is built on top of this instances, thus JS is creating temp object, wrapping primitives, to access methods
    - we can’t directly create instance for Symbol and BigInt, but JS still allows to auto-box them
    - null and undefined don’t have auto-boxing, because there is no corresponding fundamental object
- Obj.proptotype is holding corresponding methods for the type, so instance will have __proto__ linkage to it
built-in objects
- Date, Error, Number etc - defined by JS specialized objects
array
- similar to plain objects, but with number based keys
- can be defined via [] or new Array()
  - there are 3 type of methods on Array.protoptype:
    - computing and returning non-array values
    - modifying array in-place
    - modify and return copy of array
regex
- specialized object to work with regular expressions
function(callable object)

Coercion

NOTES FROM BEFORE

If types match == is the same as ===, otherwise coercion on values is done first
JS is tends to convert to a number
rules:
- if we try add smth to a string it will become string
- there is no coercion between bigint and number
technically, auto-boxing is part of coercion, caze there is primitive->object->primitive type conversion

Coercion - type conversion, aka casting one type to other

it cam be explicit or implicit(or both, based on opinion)
it is deep part of JS and even if you don’t like it, you still most certainly using it :)

by spec we have set of predefined abstract operations, that determine how values are coerced(we can’t invoke this operations, it is just method to describe behavior)

ToBoolean
- method: all values in JS are truthy of falsy and based on that ToBoolean makes a decision how to convert
  - falsy: undefined, null, "", NaN, 0, -0, 0n
  - truthy: other
  - basically it just a look-up table
- invoked at:
  - if OR ? :
    - we can’t access coerced value, it is incapsulated inside if
  - for/while
  - Boolean(), but more often !!
    - ! is unary operator to flip boolean value, that can do coercion
  - ||, &&
    - note, we aren’t coercing result, we are just checking if it is truthy or falsy
ToPrimitive
- method: takes a hint wether we converting to number or to string, than tries to convert via .toString() or .valueOf()(will be first for number or no hint) and, if final and hint types aren’t matching, additional ToString/ToNumber used
- examples
  - ToPrimitive(obj, number) -> NaN
  - ToPrimitive([], number) -> 0
- invoked for object -> primitive cases
  - we have some edge cases:
    - String(obj) -> obj.toString, but obj + "" -> String(obj.valueOf())
    - Number(obj) -> Number(obj.valueOf()), but +obj -> +obj.valueOf(), so bigint will throw
    - if result of converters is non-primitive we will get an exception
    - boolean coercion won’t delegate to ToPrimitive
- we can unbox objects with this: String(new String("123")) -> "123"
  - but there is a case with boolean: Boolean(new Booleand(false)) -> true, case of look-up table to object
ToString
- when coercing smth to string we will get similar representation as in code
  - examples:
    - String(Infinity) -> "Infinity"
    - for object to string we will get "Object[Object]"
    - nonString + "string", caze + is overloaded
      - note that such coercion will throw for symbols, with some other differences with String()
    - property access: [3] -> ["3"]
      - yep, we don’t actually have numeric indexes in JS, by spec, only symbols and strings(can be number like string)
  - exceptions:
    - large numbers will be represented via notation
    - -0 -> "0"
    - we can’t convert Symbol
      - but String() itself can, so we could still coerce, but it won’t be by mistake
    - some .toString operations can have underlying implementation of how to convert to string
ToNumber
- method
  - when coercing string, we are getting number(if string itself is full number/number with whitespaces) or NaN
  - true -> 1; false -> 0; null -> 0; undefined -> NaN; "" || " " -> 0;
  - we can’t convert Symbol and BigInt to number like this: +37n
    - but Number() itself can
- invoked at:
  - Number()
    - we can do convert from notations like this: Number("0b101010"); // 42
  - BigInt()
    - for false coercion we won’t have NaN, but rather a throw
  - +smth or any other math/bitwise operation
    - note that bitwise is clamping value to 32-bit int
- other:
  - ToNumeric - activate ToPrimitive with number hint
  - ToIntegerOrInfinity, ToInt32, ToBigInt etc
    - list is long and covers different number types, but, for the most parts, ToNumber is activated
SameValue - for equality comparison
- no coercion or exceptions, just straight equality check(not deep)
- variations
  - SameValueZero - treats 0 and -0 as same
    - invoked at: [NaN].includes(NaN); // true
  - bigint and number have their variation
  - non-numeric values are compared via SameValueNonNumeric
  - IsStrictlyEqual
    - no coercion
    - if types are matched -> numeric check
      - it is not same numeric check as pointed earlier, because in this one -0 !== 0 and NaN !== NaN
    - invoked at: .indexOf, ===
  - IsLooselyEqual
    - IF values are same -> IsStrictlyEqual ELSE do coercion
      - coercion is tending to numeric values, with minimal number of coercions
    - coercion algorithm(recursive until types are same)
      - null === undefined
      - if one is number and other is string - convert string with ToNumber
      - if one is bigint and other is string - convert string with StringToBigInt
      - boolean -> number
      - non-primitive convert with ToPrimitive with no hint(same as number hint)
      - summary: never converts to string, or boolen, or non-primitive
    - invoked at: ==
      - == is very beneficial for nullish checks, case it won’t differ null and undefined
      - if(val) !== if(val == true) case of number preference
        
        it is better to just avoid second type of coercion
- invoked at:
  - Object.is
IsLessThen - used for all relational comparisons
- it takes isLeftFirst as third parameter which determents if we need to calculate second value first
  - used to accomplish greater then, because we inverting order of parameters and order of their computation
- only coercive
- if both values are strings, string comparison kicks-in
  - method
    - check for first value to be prefix of second, if so -> true
    - compare numeric codes from start-to-end(language specific) char by char
      - most often it will result in dictionary order
      - IMPORTANT: IsLessThan("🐔","🥚", true); // true
- for number computation Number:lessThan or BigInt:lessThan are used

corner cases

String([null, undefined]) -> ","
Number("") -> 0 and Number(" ") -> 0
Number([]) -> 0
[] == ![]

More about types

TS is statically typed(types are declared while writing program and checked on compilation) and strongly typed(variable types won’t change implicitly)

basically TS forces to declare types
JS is opposite, so types are managed at runtime and can coerce
basically we can stay type-aware without TS with right variable naming and code structure, but it adds huge mental overhead
- thus TS won’t cover all corner cases and might add some more :) So it is important to still think about types etc

Async

Async is mostly about managing operations that takes quite a while to complete. Managing state, program flow(blocking/non-blocking) etc

common examples: user input, BD request, data fetching, animation handling, I/O
we can call async that part of a program, that can’t complete now and will complete later
ways to do: callback, Promise
async heavily based on event loop, case remember, there is only 1 thread to spear :)
- interestingly, proper event loop spec was introduced in ES6
- JS doesn’t have true parallelism(multy-threading)(except workers), so we always work in one process/thread and don’t have shared memory and concurrency problems
  - fearless concurrency in its base 🦀
all code in JS will run to completion, meaning if we started function execution, it will block thread until finishes
- we still have race condition problems, when it comes to order of async function execution
  - generally, it isn’t a problem for non-interacting tasks, BUT when they interact…you need to deal with it and coordinate tasks is some way
    - it is a bad practice to just assume that async tasks will always be in same order, even if one is much slower then other
  - in opposite to race scenario we have latch, which means that we care only about first finisher
- note: generator functions in-deed can be non-run until completion

cooperation - other form of concurrency, but this time we create “cooperative” code, that won’t block all event loop, while executing some heavy function

example: if we mapping across large amount of data we can break it into slices and delay executing between ticks via setTimeout(.., 0) or process.nextTick()

Callbacks

Callbacks is a most common form of async in JS. It is implemented as do some function(aka callback), when async event is finished

callbacks are base for Promise
there is a concern in callback world called “callback-hell”, that happens for multiple reasons
- it is hard for brain to process async code, case of control-flow changes, multiple scenarios(loading, errors, happy flow) etc
- purely structure of code will lead to nested logic
- harder to test
- 3-party dependencies(aka inversion of control), which may result in unexpected bugs in logic, such as
  - execute to early/late or even never
  - multiple executions
  - missing props or results(some error conversions etc)
  - SO, always be careful with too many dependencies and their updates

callback patterns:

separation of success and error flows
- do what it says
- example: ES6 Promises with .then and .catch
error first
- return error as first value to make user explicitly handle it
- example: common for some Note APIs
explicit handle of not been called
- wrap function in HOK, that will check if function was called before some delay and if not raise an error
red-blue functions
- be extremely careful, when designing APIs and avoid mixing async/sync callback handlers
  - it is preferable to make all callback handlers async, but if it is not right for your situation, try to state type of func in some way
    - this principle is called “never release Zalgo”
  - you can also add explicit “asyncify” HOK, that will always make you cb called async this patterns are aimed to resolve callback hell, but also can introduce in-efficiency and bloatiness to your code :)

Promise

Promise is a programing concept to work with async, that was integrated in JS and now a main way to work with async code

basically we writing a code like this: take a value from Promise and do this and this OR take an error and handle it in some way, BUT this value/error are placeholders, that Promise promises to resolve, when result is ready
- so we are working with future values
- key thing that Promise makes normalization of future and now values and makes all values future
  - this leads to result of Promise been future value to, thus we can chain Promises
    - note: when Promise resolves, it’s output is read-only immutable value
      - so we can observe one Promise from several places and not fear of interference
main difference from callbacks is that we don’t need any inversion of control, meaning we aren’t passing callback to be executed by Promise, it is otherway, we are getting “notified”, when Promise resolved, so we can do some action
- we can view Promise as event system OR as flow control mechanism

when constructing Promise we passing callback with resolve+reject functions as arguments, that can be called, when/if needed

this pattern of non-async cb’s are called “revealing constructor”

interestingly, it is not recommended to check received values is a Promise via instaceof, but rather with a “duck typing” pattern, that verifies a type, by checking implementation

for Promise we need to check if object is thenable, aka can work with then
it is done, case non-native API maybe used instead, that behaves as Promise
this thenable check is enforced by ES6 spec, so by adding then function to prototype of Array, all array instances will be treated as Promises

Promise resolves all of Trust problems with callbacks:

calling too early(aka Zalgo problem) - won’t happen, caze Promise is always async
calling too late - won’t happen, caze after resolve/reject call, all .then callbacks will be called “immediately”(on next possibility, inside queue)
never calling - .then cb will be called, even in case of an error, after resolving of a Promise
- it is still a concern that Promise will just hang and never call resolve, BUT we can utilize Promise.race with Promise, that will regect after some delay, thus we can easily fix this
calling too many times - Promise always takes first resolve/reject in function and ignoring others, so we are getting only 1 call(or 0 as raised before)
not passing all arguments - Promise guarantees to pass first parameter of resolve/reject and ignores others(intended)
- same applies for swallowing errors, BUT it is also important, that Promise will reject because of built-in errors as well(similar to try/catch)
  - and we even can catch from .then callbacks, by chaining but recalling thenable problem it may appear, that it is easy to fake Promise, until its not
ES6 specifies Promise.resolve(...), which takes any value and tries to unwrap it, if it thenable, until non-thenable value is reached and returned
- so we can pass some fake thenable(or even non-thenable) value and take back normalized Promise

Promise is made chainable, meaning we can chaine multiple Promises together by passing result, this achieved via:

then always returns Promise
return from inside then is performing Promise unwrapping, so we never end-up with nested structure
all returned values are passed to next then
note: if we hadn’t pass rejection handler(second parameter to then, we will end up with unhandled rejection, caze JS have default function that re-throws error)
- same will happen to first argument, but it will simply return value
- this pattern is called a pit of despair, which means that program punishes wrong actions by default
  - the opposite is pit of success
- it is usually a good practice to end Promise chain with final catch, that will handle our final error
  - but be careful with unhandled error in catch itself :)

Promise unwrapping

it is important to consider that reject function won’t do any unwrapping and pass value as is
- it is similar to throw in then, which won’t unwrap/promisify any value and will just proceed to next chain element
- but resolve will un-wrap/promisify, similar to return in then

Error handling

incorrect usage of Promise API leads to immediate exception and not in rejected Promise

Promise patterns

chaining
Promise.all([...]) - take a bunch of Promises inside and resolve, when all Promises finish
- empty array will immediately resolve
- all values inside array will be normalized to Promise via Promise.resolve()
- result will be an array, with resolved values in order of original Promises in array
- rejection of one Promise will caze rejection of all
Promise.race([...]) - take an array of Promises and resolve, when first resolves
- have same nuances as Promise.all, but will never resolve for empty array
- can make a memory leak, if some Promises inside won’t resolve
finaly - used to do clean-up, when Promise finishes, despite of result
- we can’t cancel Promise run
Promise.none([...]) - revers of Promise.all, where all rejection will become resolution values
Promise.any([...]) - same as Promise.all, but ignores any rejections
Promise.first([...])- similar to Promise.race, but ignores any rejections
- reverse - Promise.last([...])

Limitations

we can’t observe all errors inside Promise chain reliably, meaning, some errorHandlers can swallow error and we will miss it
Promise resolve in a single value(more a limitation of JS)
- but it can push dev to take another approach and split Promise into two separate functions, which reduces coupling and there for great
Promise is only resolves once, so we can’t subscribe to some event with one Promise, we need to revert and create Promise for each subscription
- observable pattern can be helpful for such cases
We can’t cancel Promise
- which is good, caze of immutability, but it still maybe useful to timeout Promise
Less performant that raw dogging callbacks, but you are getting more trustable code with higher dev experience
- but why use JS in a first place, if you need performance :)

Generators

Generator - type of function, that can stop and re-new later it’s execution, so run is broken into partial completions and full completion can be achieved after more then one partial completion

this pattern helps with building more linear async flow in ES6(pre async/await)

generator can be defined as function *funcName() {} and yield keyword can be used inside of it to break execution flow

execution flow

calling the function will construct iterator INSTANCE for function
- it is important, that it is instance with it’s own state and have no shared state with function/other instances
  - we can force some interesting concurrency with generators and shared scope
- note: for ES6 to consider object iterable it need to have Symbol.iterator, that return iterator(usually new instance)
  - it enables usage of such function with for of etc
    - it is important that for or won’t pass any value to .next()
  - object can be iterator and iterable at the same time
  - generator is not iterable(we can’t iterate through it’s values), but it is never the less can create an iterator(which is also an iterable)
iterator.next() will start/continue function execution, until yield keyword is met
- this will pause our function and return object with intermediate result
  - value - result that was passed to yield/return
  - done - if function fully finished it’s execution
- we can use yield as value
  - function will stop, when trying to eval it and next next(val) will evaluate this yield with passed val
  - this result in count(next) = count(yield) + 1, case we first start execution and only then evaluation yields
- other variation of .next() is .throw()
stopping generator
- default way to stop generator - use iterator.return(val)
- it may seam, that non-returned generators will hang infinitely, after, for example, for..of is finished, but JS have Abnormal completion pattern, which means that, when for..of finishes - send signal to kill iterator
- any exceptions will stop generator
- generators give a possibility to clean-up with finally {} syntax
  - this code will execute, when stopping is triggered

Generators with Async

generator enables pattern, that allows to stop function execution, until we get some result and than continue it, without using callbacks

we still have a possibility of error handling via try+catch and .throw() OR not, if not caught, caze generator will just re-throw it
it is a predecessor to async/await
it is important to remember, that we can still call async code concurrently/in-paralel, for optimization
- it might be useful to abstract hard Promise logic into one “async” function and then call it via await for simplicity

Generator delegation

we can delegate execution from one generator function to other via yield* func2(), so basically our func2 will now be controlled from it’s parent iterator, until finished and control of parent is returned

from outside it seems as we just control func2 parent, caze all values/responses/errors are pathed through, except return, wich will fulfill funct2 value at the end, inside it’s parent
it is possible to delegate to itself via recursion calls
note: we are delegating iterator control
it is possible to construct any iterator from iterable this way: yeld* []

Thunk

Thunk - older approach of handling async, which is done by wrapping original function into it’s Thunk, where it is immediately called, with some predefined(can be partially) parameters

default way of dealing is to use callback-last approach, where, when thunkifying we predefining all parameters at first and leaving last callback parameter unknown to pass to thunk itself
- we can take two approaches to making thunks factories
  - factory that creates thunk with parameters
  - factory that creates thunk factory, that will wrap function, but binding to parameters will be done via separate call
thunk pattern can be viewed as symmetrical to promises in basic functionality, but all-in-all Promises in JS have mush more overhead

Pre-ES6 Generators

It is impossible to polyfil a generator, caze it is new syntax and not API, but there are tools, that can transpile new syntax into all code with same functionality

Basic approach to creating generator analog is to create a function, that will keep in-scope state and current part of program + an executor inner function, that will perform actions for this part of program, with existing state + return an object with next and throw functions, that will wire state changes and output, based on executor results

it is basic approach, that won’t be fully compatible, so use libs instead :)

Performance

User perception of performance is every bit — if not more! — as important as actual measurable performance.

WebWorkers

JS doesn’t have any way of native multi-threading, but environment can enable it Here comes WebWorkers - browser’s API to achieve multi-threading

WebWorkers enable “task parallelism”, which is meant we can run some part of program on separate thread, as separate instance of JS
it is important, that worker is guaranteed to have separate thread, but we can’t be sure, that it will be real thread(it is possible, but is still browsers decision)

API: initiate worker via:

const worker = new Worker("http://url/toJsFile.js");

we are passing a link to file, that will be ran under separate thread
- this worker is named “Dedicated Worker”
- it is also possible to pass blob link to some inline <script> and run it as worker
  - it will create an “Inline Worker”
workers are created one-to-one
- but workers can still have sub-workers
- each worker, created from same file will be separate instance

to communicate between workers we can use worker object, that is event listener and emitter

"message" is fixed event name to listen
.postMessage(data) is used to send events
inside a worker we can use top level addEventListener or use top level function postMessage()

to stope worker we have worker.terminate(), which kills it without finishing/clean up

Environment

worker can’t access anything from parent thread, more over his environment is a bit uniq
- we still can do fetch, WebSockets, timers, JSON, location etc
- importScripts(link_1, link_2, ...) will sync-load any needed script

Usage

math
parallel operations with large data sets, like: sorting
heavy data operations: image/audio/video processing, compression
high-traffic network operations

Data transfer

default way is to use serialization to string
- problems: double memory usage, serialization+de-serialization of data
other way is to pass object, that will be “smart” cloned by browser
- it is important to keep an eye of wether some feature is usable or not with some browser(or it’s version)
the best approach is to rely on “Transferable Objects”, which means that we are passing ownership and not data
- object need to implement special interface to be “transferable”
- older browsers will just copy object and thats it
- example:

// arr: Uint8Array
postMessage(arr.buffer, [arr.buffer]);

SharedWorkers

SharedWorker - type of WebWorker, that can be shared via multiple instances of an app(for example tabs)

useful case is to create SharedWorker, that will create one socket connection and manage data between tabs, so we won’t exceed max number of opened sockets

API: initiate via:

const sw = new SharedWorker("http://url/toJsFile.js");

caze worker can be shared, we need to distinct incoming users, which is done via port:

sw.port.addEventListener("message", handler);
sw.port.postMessage(data);
we need to first init this port: sw.port.start();
- this is must be listened with response in such way:

addEventListener("connect", (e) => {
  const port = e.ports[0];

  port.addEventListener("message", ...);
  port.start();
} );

sw will survive terminate, if other connections are still opened

other capabilities are same with WebWorkers

it is problematic to polyfil workers, caze there is no real multi-threading, but:

it is possible to use iframe as source of separate env, but it is still same thread
it is possible to virtualize one thread via event loop via setTimeout

SIMD

Single instruction multiple data - patter to achieve “data parallelism”, which enables processing some data by parts, where each part is done in parallel

usually achieved via CPU’s “vectors”, that is array-like data number structure, with strict sizes, that enables SIMD
great pattern, but currently died on Stage 3, caze of browser support problems with alternative to WebAssembly

Asm.js

Asm.js - subset of JS, with aim to optimization, that avoids some hard to optimize stuff(GC, coercion etc) and works only with ams aware engines

it possible, that it will be integrated to TC39, but for now it is not there yet and typical way of using it is - compiling via some 3d-party tools and running in ASM-engine
it is common to meet asm in game dev space

using asm.js(as said, it is more common to compile to asm.js, but we can write it by hand)

if variable will be always int32, we can state it by doing things like this: let b = a | 0, which is do nothing operation for JS, but for asm states that it is int32, case | is int only operation
asm have a concept of “modules” - some pre-allocated heap(with no possibility of growing) with hardcoded to it global APIs
- this way we avoiding GC and memory allocation

Benchmarking

common way to do is start = Date.now(); ...; conosole.log(Date.now() - start);

problems
- older systems can measure time in slices more than 1ms
- same code can output different time, depending on number of runs or system state overall
- outliers can ruin stats, BUT we can’t fully throw them away, case they are still valid tuns, so it is important to find out reason why they ran so
- you most probably have skill-issues in statistics and just can’t write a proper tool :)
you can run a function in a loop, but you need to have enough runs, so average will be not too hight
- and it is better to base number of runs on time(based on timer accuracy) and not just count

better approach - use some lib(as always btw)

benchmark.js
- API
  - to run head-to-head tests there are Suite API inside lib
  - options
    - setup/teardown - do something before/after each test cycle
      - important, that it is not for each test run

const b = new Benchmark(testName, func, options);

b.["some property with statisitcal data about benchmark"];

.
- use-cases
  - test performance of function
  - compare two functions
  - run similar to unit tests to test-out critical performance in some part of an app
    - it is also possible to track down/up-grades between releases

remember to never over-optimize, it more often than not just not worse it as a general rule of thumb it is better to write some stuff, test and then, if needed, optimize

it is also important to note, that engine can add some over-optimizations(something, that might not be possible to meet in real scenarios) to your synthetic tests
- but we can’t rely on engine optimizations, caze it is matter to change and not really public
- remember that synthetic tests are evil :)
it is also important to take in consideration some additional allocations, function creations etc
- also don’t create tests with different outcomes

there is interesting website jsperf.com, that collects test results from variety of environments(devices, browsers etc), so it is more fair to check results of Y faster than X here

good tests are done by

including more relevant context
- don’t just synthetically test on small snippet
keep an eye on unintentional differences

funny engine optimizations that might not be in JS, but possible

factorial(5) can be replaced with 120
engine can rewrite code from recursion to loop, if it seems to be more optimized
variables can be inlined with values
arr.length call is more performant than pre-cashing this value

Tail Call Optimization(TCO)

Introduced in ES6, TCO - sort of optimization, which happens in cases, where we are calling function at the end of another function, so there is only option to return it’s result or do nothing

usually met in recursions
main algorithm is to detect if it is a tail call and, if so, call function on current stack frame, without wasting memory on a new one
- otherwise we need to limit depth of recursion, so keep an eye on it

Async Patterns

Some advanced patterns, that can be built on top of Promises+generators+async/await, with/without external libs

iterrable
- map/for..of through array of Promises
- can be done one by one in parallel OR wait for all -> perform operation -> wait for operation to complete
expandable
- example: request for data, IF there is more -> request again, IF NOT -> finish
event reactive
- async event emitter, which will fire after async operation completion + listener
  - note: it is impossible to do with one Promise, case it is resolved once, so you need to create new Promise, for each emmittion
  - basically it is an observable from RxJS, which we might(or not) get later, if Observable proposal is passed
- in it’s core, it is again based on generator+iterator patter :)
coroutine
- run two generators in parallel, with passing control from one to another
- via this pattern we can create state machine, which is basically some executor, that will execute one function or another, depending on current state, until “stop” condition is met
communicating sequential processes
- in it’s core a method to concurrent processes to communicate during execution
  - in JS can be again done via generators, by stoping function A, with passing message to B and unblocking A, when B is ready and received message
    - it is like that, caze CSP must be done in a sync-looking way
    - there are more into it, with buffers, that act as communication channels between processes and other stuff, that eventually leads to data streams
- CSP states, that we aren’t passing control as in coroutines, but rather blocking execution, when waiting for the value OR blocking execution, when trying to send a value, but channels isn’t available yet

Clean Code JS

adaptation of Clean Code principles onto JS

Variables

use meaningful and explanatory variable names
create simular vocabulary(getClient, createClient, ~~updateUser~~)
don’t use magic numbers
don’t repeat context in var names(~~Car.carModel~~)
default values in func is better than name || "Joe"
useful pattern to create objs with default value

const defaultObj = {
  name: 'Joe',
  age: 18,
}

const obj = {
  ...defaultObj,
  name: 'Mike'm
}

avoid negative conditions in vars(for example: isNotLoading)

Functions

it is good to limit func args to 2-3. If more is needed it is better to use object arg with destruction
- approves testability
- single responsibility
one func - one task
- avoid adding different functional based on args(for example: createUpdateUser(toUpdate: bool))
func name must describe func
DRY by adding right abstractions to codebase
avoid side effects(write files, modifying vars)
- it is good practice to create one service that will handle mutations/side effects
- usually it is better to clone and return new obj then modify passed into func
don’t extend default functions/classes by adding property to prototype
- better approach to create superClass that extends default

class superArr extends Array {
  findSumm() {}
}

it is good practice to lean towards functional programing(for example: arr.map().reduce instead of doing it line by line)
encapsulate conditions

function shouldShowSpinner(fsm, listNode) {
  return fsm.state === "fetching" && isEmpty(listNode);
}

if (shouldShowSpinner(fsmInstance, listNodeInstance)) {
  // ...
}

decrease if/else by polymorphism and single responsibility
avoid typechecking by using TS + polymorphism
don’t over optimize if it is already handled under hood
remove dead code

Objects and Data structures

prefer get/set
- adds possibility to process/validate data + possibility to error handling and logging
- encapsulation
it is good practice to add chaining to class
composition better then inheritance
- it is still good to use inheritance when:
  - object1 “is-a” object2 (Human is an Animal)
  - object1 reuses code from object2 (Human moves like Animal)

Solid

Testing

More important that shipping. Ideally cover 100% of codebase with tests

one test - one task
async/await >> Promise >> callback

Error handling

throw - good
it is bad to add catch but left error unhandled
- console.log is better, but still not preferable

Formatting

use auto-formatting tools
good rule to name classes from capital and const capsed
keep caller and callee close
comments are good, but even better when code documents itself
- remove commented code