Concurrent JavaScript — A year’s absence

If you don’t know what Nexus.js is, please start reading here:

Concurrent JavaScript — Introduction

Previous:

Concurrent JavaScript VI: Server

I almost dropped this project altogether.

The only reason why I didn’t, was all the support I received after my talk at Nordic.js 2016. I’ll always remember those days fondly, the team was amazing and the audience was supportive. I was honestly shocked when no one booed at me after my embarrassing instance of stage fright. If you’re interested in the talk, here it is:

Concurrent JavaScript: The Talk

I think it’s time to come clean about something, though. Some of what I’m about to write here is personal. I hope you don’t mind.

While in Sweden, I ate something or the other right before the talk, which triggered a severe allergic reaction all over my body, and I instantly started foaming at the mouth and (as I soon discovered) bleeding from the digestive tract.

I was completely demoralised at the time, and I dared not tell a soul. I think I hid it well. But walking on stage to talk in front of thousands while bleeding from your nethers will completely and utterly demoralise you.

During the past year I have been struggling with the same issue, and wrongly assuming it was the result of cancer.

I did not visit a doctor for fear of alerting my family to the condition (or to be brutally honest, just the fear of finding out). I didn’t even tell my best friend (or my brother) until much later.

So when my brother was diagnosed with Gluten intolerance, and on a hunch I quit eating wheat, I was finally relieved for the first time in a very long and depressive year.

Ever since I quit eating Gluten, it all stopped and I’m back to normal. Even better than my original ‘normal’ had been. I’m much healthier and I’m no longer sleeping 12 hours a day.

But the past is in the past. I think I’m now in a better place — both physically and mentally — to pursue my dreams.

During the year I was struggling to work on a web app my co-founders and I were trying to launch, hence I was (and still am) heavily invested in the development of an open source CMS for use in our project.

CloudPress - Part 1: How to reinvent a better wheel!

I’m still working on that, but I’ve also decided to work on Nexus.js seriously during my spare time.

So, what’s new?

I just landed a very big commit on GitHub, which adds support for ES6 modules to the engine! Nexus now integrates with JavaScriptCore on a fundamental level.

ES6 Module Support

In addition, WebKit has progressed a long way since last year, now it supports the async/await pattern out of the box.

Promise-based EventEmitter

Streams and devices are as fast as ever, with 800MB of output converted from UTF8 to UTF16-LE in 564 milliseconds (fractionally longer than my last test, but then again I’m on a different system):

Streaming and devices

And now, standing on the precipice, I’m about to finish implementing HTTP(S) and Websockets (using beast, which I just migrated to) and then I plan on working on HTTP2.

Any Questions?

Do you have any questions? I would be happy to answer them. Send them here in the comments or to @voodooattack on Twitter, and as always: you can review the code for the project on GitHub.

This is the end of this series, but fear not! There’s always a new beginning! Read the new series below!

Introducing Nexus.js: A multi-threaded JavaScript run-time

Continue reading on dev.to. There we will touch on everything that’s been implemented so far, and benchmark HTTP request performance using chunked encoding! (spoiler: we break records!)