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Compartments

Stage: 1

Champions:

  • Mark S. Miller, Agoric
  • Caridy Patiño, Salesforce
  • Patrick Soquet, Moddable
  • Kris Kowal, Agoric
  • Jack Works, Sujitech
  • Guy Bedford, OpenJS Foundation

Emeritus:

  • Bradley Farias, GoDaddy
  • Jean-Francois Paradis, Salesforce

Synopsis

Compartments are a mechanism for isolating and providing limited power to programs within a shared realm. Each compartment shares the intrinsics of a realm, but a different set of evaluators (eval, Function, and a new evaluator, Module) and a global object. Having a separate global object allows each compartment to be granted access to only those powerful objects it needs, its own isolated evaluators, powerless constructors, and shared prototypes.

The Compartments proposal was approved for Stage 1 (exploration of a problem) with the charter, "to compartmentalize host behaviors". The problem we set out to solve was excess authority flowing from global scope and host behaviors into third-party dependencies and plugins in large applications. Through exploring this problem, we discovered that the bulk of the solution, by weight, was virtualizing the EcmaScript module loader. Provided an EcmaScript module loader, we could then build a solution for isolating code for both scripts and modules.

Over the course of two years, we refined the Compartment class to account for the need to make and import bundles, emulate various host module specifier namespaces, link modules between multiple compartments, and support non-EcmaScript module languages.

We then began working with champions of module blocks, module fragments, deferred import, and import reflection to ensure these proposals were coherent. From these discussions, we discovered a set of lower-level interfaces from which compartments could be constructed in user code that were more coherent with these other proposals.

With that, the Compartments proposal consists of five layers:

  • Module and ModuleSource: Provide first-class Module and ModuleSource constructors and extend dynamic import to operate on Module instances. (Specification Changes)

  • Surface Module Source Static Analysis: Extend instances of ModuleSource such that they reflect certain results of static analysis, like their import and export bindings, such that tools can inspect module graphs.

  • Virtual Module Sources: Extend the Module constructor such that it accepts virtual module sources: objects that implement a protocol that is sufficient for virtualizing the evaluation of modules in languages not anticipated by ECMA-262 or host implementations.

  • Evaluators: Provide an Evaluators constructor that produces a new eval function, Function constructor, and Module constructor such that execution contexts generated from these evaluators refer back to this set of evaluators, with a given global object and virtualized host behavior for dynamic import in script contexts.

  • Compartment: Compartments are a high-level mechanism for isolating and providing limited power to programs within a shared realm. Compartments can be implemented in user code using Evaluators, Module, and ModuleSource.

Motivating use cases for module proposal features illustrates the motivation for each feature from the layers of this Compartments proposal and related module proposals.