[Pl-seminar] 10/23: Nicholas R. Labich, "Analyzing JavaScript: The Bad Parts"

[Vincent St-Amour]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Nicholas R. Labich
NUPRL

11:45 - 1:30
Wednesday, 10/23
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Analyzing JavaScript: The Bad Parts

JavaScript is popular, powerful, and flagrantly dynamic. It is a relatively
young language with a low barrier to entry and massive amounts of code in the
wild. As such, tools that allow programmers to reason about the language are
increasingly valuable. Much of the research to date targets subsets of
JavaScript, eliding the darker corners of the language (the bad parts).

In this talk, I discuss static analysis of JavaScript including the bad parts:
property and object descriptors, getters and setters, strict mode, and
eval. Leveraging LambdaS5, a core semantics encapsulating the ECMAScript 5.1
standard, I detail the approach, implementation, and difficulties involved
with the abstract interpretation of full, modern JavaScript.