JavaScript Language Support

JavaScript Support

JavaScript features supported by Higgs include:

• Objects and methods
• Dynamic addition and deletion of object properties
• Prototype-based inheritance
• Garbage-collection
• Dynamically resizeable arrays
• Closures
• Constructor functions
• Variadic functions and the arguments object
• If/switch statements
• For/while/do loops
• For-in loop
• Exceptions and try/catch/finally
• Dynamic code loading with the load() function
• Evaluation of code strings in the global scope with eval
• JSON.parse and JSON.stringify
• Regular expressions
• UTF-16 strings and string operations
• Integer and floating-point arithmetic
• Automatic insertion of missing semicolons

Some features currently missing from Higgs are:

• Getters and setters
• The with statement, which is not yet implemented
• Property attributes (e.g.: non-enumerable, read-only)

Language Extensions

Higgs also supports some custom extensions to JavaScript:

• Low-level primitives for arithmetic and pointer manipulation
• A Foreign Function Interface (FFI) library for interfacing with C code
• A simple module system based on CommonJS Modules v1.0