Hello JavaScript Studio
Building a cloud service to find runtime errors in JavaScript
More than a year ago, I started playing with an idea to build a dynamic analyzer for JavaScript. While static analysis is very limited in JavaScript, dynamic analysis usually takes too much time. I was curious to find out if it could be done faster. To free up some time to build a prototype, I reduced my day-job to 80%, allowing me to work on the idea every Friday. The outcome was promising, so after one year of doing this on the side, I’ve quit my job and started my own company 🎉
I love JavaScript. I’ve spend the last 7 years working on some ridiculously large JavaScript code bases, building trading applications for Swiss banks. Especially in the financial industry, production errors have a tendency to be really expensive. So a lot of time went into our test suite. It’s great to have tests for a new feature, or to make sure that bug never bites you again, but writing tests just to make sure all code paths have been executed … not so much fun.
This is where JavaScript Studio will come in. It evaluates all code branches in a custom runtime and extracts type information from plain JavaScript. It does not require any annotations or language extensions. It’s going to be available as a cloud service to integrate with continuous integration systems and pull requests. The plan is to launch a private beta early 2017. It will be a minimal implementation, only supporting ES 2015 and Node 0.12 compatible libraries. From there, I will continuously add more language features and runtime environments. If you’re interested, leave your email address at https://javascript.studio to get on the list.
There will be a free offering for open source projects. I’m also planing to open source some general purpose projects that I’m building to run JavaScript Studio on serverless infrastructure. Make sure to subscribe here for further announcements, or follow javascript-studio on GitHub.
Edit: How would you like to use JavaScript Studio? I’ve made a survey with 10 short questions (closed).
Edit II: The survey results can be found in the “JavaScript Studio publicly available” post.
