Anne van Kesteren

Vats

Objects live in Vats. Realms are a legacy accident due to poor browser engineering and do not control the object addressing space. Vats can only communicate through message passing. Messages clone objects, sometimes transfering their underlying data. Ever-so-slowly ECMAScript is growing more powerful to describe the web platform. This kind of modeling is what excites me these days.

Thanks to Allen Wirfs-Brock for correcting my errors in writing this and providing these cool analogies:

(Mark Miller did this long ago in E and the web has a somewhat sloppier version of it, through workers, structured cloning, and having multiple globals, but on the upside is deployed widely.)