

Typed Arrays in ECMAScript 6 - madflame991
http://www.2ality.com/2015/09/typed-arrays.html

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rauschma
Typed Arrays are not the most exciting part of ECMAScript 6, but it is still
good that they are part of the language now (vs. only a browser API). What
surprised me while researching the post was how many browser APIs support
Typed Arrays for binary data: File API, XMLHttpRequest, Fetch API, Canvas,
WebSockets, WebGL, Web Audio API, and others.

(Disclaimer: I’m the author of the blog post.)

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aeflash
Are typed arrays stored outside of the JS heap? For example, in node.js you
can use Buffers to get around V8's 1.8GB JS heap limit -- are typed arrays
similar? Does the ES6 spec specify whether typed arrays should be stored
separately from the JS heap, or is that an implementation detail?

~~~
rauschma
Yes, that is left unspecified in the spec:

* [http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/#sec-allocate...](http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/#sec-allocatearraybuffer) (relevant: step 4, CreateByteDataBlock())

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ant6n
I use typed arrays in Python when I need to store a lot of data in memory, and
the overhead of objects would be too large (for example I built a little
library that can load a country's worth of openstreetmap data).

What I really miss is typed dictionaries (int -> int).

~~~
rauschma
I don’t think there’ll ever be typed dictionaries (which are a fairly high-
level data structure). There is, however, a proposal for typed objects:
[https://github.com/dslomov/typed-objects-
es7](https://github.com/dslomov/typed-objects-es7)

~~~
ant6n
Well, one could build a typed object-array library using typed arrays (i.e.
use one typed array for every member). This actually gives me an idea... :P

But you wouldn't want to rebuild a dict using integer arrays, that would be
pretty slow.

