Mozilla, Cloudflare & Others Propose BinaryAST For Faster JavaScript Load Times

Developers at Mozilla, Facebook, Cloudflare, and elsewhere have been drafting "BinaryAST" as a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript.

BinaryAST is a binary representation of the original JavaScript code and associated data structures to speed-up the parsing of the code at the page load time compared to the JavaScript source itself. The binary abstract syntax tree format should lead to faster script loading across all web devices. Numbers related today by CloudFlare range from a 4% to 13% drop in load times compared to parsing conventional JavaScript source. Or if taking a "lazified" approach to skip unused functions, it can be upwards of 98% less time necessary.

Those wanting to learn more about BinaryAST can see CloudFlare's blog post while the BinaryAST proposal itself is currently being drafted on GitHub.