Kevin Gibbons

JavaScript, TC39, language design, math. I try to avoid twitter, but some conversations only happen here.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@jarredsumner I am once again asking you to get Anthropic to sponsor someone to work on the existing structs proposal instead.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@sebastienlorber Someday! I'm definitely not putting it in the first version of async iterator helpers; it's been taking too long as it is. But I'll be doing followups for stuff like this and zip as soon as the basic helpers land.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@matteocollina @jarredsumner Sponsor someone to work on https://t.co/7NSyO3aw3C! Ideally @jarredsumner would get Anthropic to sponsor someone to work on it. @_shu was the main person driving it but that was when he was at V8.

That's the biggest blocker IMO.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@jarredsumner @mitsuhiko Just using the `private` keyword for declarations was never an option because you also need a different way of _accessing_ private properties (or else they either don't really work or slow down everything else). So it was pretty much this or nothing.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@wesbos @kettanaito For me the main reason not to do an overload was because it makes `Promise.all(foo)` harder to read - is that going to return an object or an array? New functions aren't really any more expensive than overloads so not much reason to do an overload really.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@jarredsumner please tell claude to make the atomics look like the ones described in https://t.co/7NSyO3aw3C instead of being your own bespoke thing

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@JoyeeCheung I just went through this (API-breaking change to V8, requiring a patch to node-ci) and this would have been very helpful. Thanks for the writeup.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@juberti Any info on WER or similar for gpt-realtime-whisper? Hard to know if it's worth trying without that, especially at 10x the price of competitors.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@sergeantsup My least favorite form of this is "I find it interesting that you [some uncharitable framing of interlocutor's opinion/behavior here]".

This is a coward's way of avoiding making direct accusations. If you want to accuse someone of hypocrisy of whatever, do so.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@KentonVarda Incidentally the spec does now say to null out the resolver because I fixed that too: https://t.co/AMsgBrZcyl

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@KentonVarda I have an open CL fixing this! It is working its way through the process. https://t.co/2MvXHd3yBQ

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@KentonVarda @domenic Firefox already doesn't do this. Not sure about Safari, couldn't follow their code and I didn't both with writing a benchmark. So, not a cross-runtime issue.

(Well, "bug". Chrome did it on purpose, for a diagnostic. But no one uses that diagnostic anymore so it can be removed.)

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@domenic @KentonVarda I have an open CL for it already: https://t.co/2MvXHd3yBQ

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

My most idiosyncratic JS opinion is that we should all write

`0, { x } = y;`

instead of

`({ x } = y);`

so you don't have to jump to the end of the line to add the parenthesis. If only I could convince tooling to support this... (i.e. get prettier not to add the parentheses)

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@sergeantsup @GeneralAntilles @acesounderglass has an article about this https://t.co/rCP8HWgk97

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@robpalmer2 @proxy_vector @jarredsumner Base64 shipped in stable Safari 9 months before it shipped in stable Chrome (2024-12-11 vs 2025-09-02), for example.

And because bun picks up JSC faster than node picks up V8, it shipped in Bun on 2024-08-07 and in Node not until 2025-10-15.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@simonw For the Random button, sessionStorage would be more appropriate. That'll be specific to the current tab.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@as0355 @robpalmer2 @matteocollina @nodejs V8 uses a lot of libraries and increasingly the libraries it would want to use will be written in Rust. Porting this and other such libraries to C++ would be a lot of work for little gain and significant downsides. And Temporal is user-exposed, so safety matters a lot.

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@as0355 @robpalmer2 @matteocollina @nodejs It is very very large.

Also, Chrome already uses Rust libraries elsewhere, and I expect V8 will want to do so in the future as well. Had to happen sometime, might as well happen now.

(Plus memory safety is nice, especially for JS engines.)

[Kevin Gibbons @bakkoting]

@_rafaelgss I think LavaMoat/SES is pretty solid actually!