19 July 2018
18:30

July.Jozi.js: Welcome to the future

We are going to have another two awesome talks at July.Jozi.js. Justin is going to tell us how to build our own browser games using Rust and WebAssembly and Ridhwana will give us some fresh insights on how Javascript works under the hood. Join us for some drinks*, pizza and JavaScript!

(*or analogous celebratory beverage)

Agenda:

  • 18:30 - Food and blah blah.
  • 19:00 - Rust, WebAssembly, and Browser Games - Justin Worthe.
  • 19:15 - Javascript under the hood - Ridhwana Khan.
  • 20:15 - More blah blah.

Rust, WebAssembly, and Browser Games: Justin Worthe

Say you're writing a computer game. For argument sake, you've decided not to take the easy (and much more efficient) route of using an existing game engine like Unreal or Unity. No, you've decided to write your own game engine.

Unfortunately, when choosing a programming language, you've run into a conflict! When you finally ship your game, you want to take advantage of all the high performance of running a native application. A language like Rust is an excellent fit for this. On the other hand, it will be much easier to share your game if you were to write it with web technologies and embed it in a web page, so maybe you should be writing it in JavaScript?

One way to reconcile this conflict is by using WebAssembly. In this talk, you'll see how it's done in an example of a game written in the Rust programming language, running both natively and embedded in a web browser.

Javascript under the hood: Ridhwana Khan

According to Github statistics, Javascript is the most used language today. As new Javascript frameworks and libraries are released, teams are utilizing them across all levels of the stack - the frontend, backend, desktop apps, hybrid apps, embedded devices and so much more.

There are many developers that are using Javascript every day, all day - however, many of us haven’t really delved deep into understanding the internals. Newer frameworks have made it such that developers can build full applications without ever learning about things like the javascript engine, callback queues, runtime, call stacks, concurrency, event loops, and the V8 engine.

Understanding the nuts and bolts of javascript is no longer a requirement to be able to build applications, however, knowing the details assist developers to be able to build better, cleaner and optimized applications.

During this talk, I’d like to provide you with fresh insights on how Javascript works under the hood!