Igalia and TC39

Igalia is a highly active participant in advancing JavaScript through TC39 (the standards working group that specifies the JavaScript language). Igalians have served in leadership positions on the committee, and we have been leading the development of features such as BigInt, private fields, and an internationalization library. Igalia works with implementors and the broader JavaScript community to evolve the language in a direction which satisfies all requirements and constraints. Igalia also writes Test262 conformance tests for new features, which accelerate the compatible implementation of these features by multiple JavaScript engines.

Implementing new JavaScript language features

Igalia has played a key role in implementing ECMAScript language features such as generators, iterators, arrow functions, async/await, and BigInt in V8, JavaScriptCore (JSC), and SpiderMonkey. Following the implementation of these features, Igalia has continued to maintain them upstream. For example, we have made significant optimizations of Promises and async/await in V8 and have fixed any issues as they are reported.

Porting JavaScript engines to embedded platforms

Igalia maintains the MIPS and ARMv7 ports of JSC, including their support in the optimizing compiler (JIT). These JIT compilers have been found to be critical for performance, especially on embedded devices, based on benchmarks of interactive performance of client applications. Maintenance of these ports over time is important in order to keep up-to-date with improvements in performance, security and features from upstream developments.

Implementing new WebAssembly language features

In addition to our focus on JavaScript, we are involved in the community for WebAssembly, a new language for the web designed as a performant and secure compilation target for C, C++, and other languages. Igalians contribute to both the standardization process and to implementing proposed WebAssembly extensions in browser engines.

Active contributors to open source compilers

Through all of our work on programming languages for the web, Igalia works closely with upstream open source projects. Several project members are trusted committers to the projects they are contributing to, based on the experience of collaboration over several years.

Our work on JavaScript and WebAssembly is informed by our team’s experience with other languages, compilers, and tools including Python, Scheme, Ruby, LuaJIT, GCC, LLVM, GDB, and Factor.