Stratified JavaScript

This is a neat project. It would be great if there was a better explanation of how it actually works. From glancing at the code, here's an example of what it appears to do:

It transforms this:

  doSomething();
  hold(timeInMs);
  doSomethingElse();

Into this:

  doSomething();
  setTimeout(function() {
    doSomethingElse();
  }, timeInMs);

Basically, it uses code transformation to transform "synchronous" code into "asynchronous", callback-based code. The previous example isn't too bad, but if one starts adding many more callbacks, code can quickly become much more unreasonable. Worse still, it gets painful to refactor synchronous code into asynchronous code and back. Stratified JavaScript attempts to handle this slow, largely mechanical work for you.

It's not actually this simple, though--the javascript is actually compiled down to a representation that is executed by the Oni (http://www.croczilla.com/oni) runtime.

It also appears to allow one to "suspend" code at the callback breaks, passing it around as a continuation and resuming when required.

I would say this effort is broadly similar to the delimited continuations support in Scala 2.8. See http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2096.

This project has been around for a while, and I've always found it really interesting. I wish more people were working on approaches like this to make asynchronous programming easier on the developer.

I wish it discussed more about how it works. I looked over that page and the Oni site and without downloading the code and looking at it I didn't see any way to understand what it is actually doing.