Talk Beginner Apache 2.0

JavaScript Is Collecting Capabilities Faster Than We Can Update Tutorials

Review Pending

Session Description

JavaScript has had one of the weirdest evolutions in tech.

It started as a small scripting language for browsers. Then it took over servers. Then mobile apps. Then desktop apps. And now somehow we’re talking about GPU acceleration, browser-native AI, scientific computing, and high-performance workloads running directly inside a tab.

At this point, every time we think we understand what JavaScript is for, the ecosystem unlocks another capability nobody expected.

In this talk, we’ll explore some of the surprisingly powerful things modern JavaScript runtimes can do today: WebGPU, WebAssembly, multicore processing, browser-native compute, numerical computing, and local-first architectures.

Through demos, benchmarks, and real-world examples, we’ll look at where these technologies genuinely make sense, where they don’t, and why modern browsers are becoming far more capable than most developers still realize.

Because honestly, JavaScript is evolving faster than our mental model of the web.

References

https://github.com/stdlib-js/stdlib

https://youtu.be/rox9LZz_ffI?si=xGQ24qjTEXTad82K

Session Categories

Technology architecture

Introducing a FOSS project or a new version of a popular project

Engineering practice - productivity, debugging

Talk License: Apache 2.0

Speakers

Gunj Joshi Core developer | stdlib

Gunj Joshi is a core developer of stdlib, the JavaScript standard library for numerical and scientific computing. His work spans special mathematical functions, implementations of FFTs, and automated generation of high-performance packages at scale. He has previously worked with IBM Research around Quantum Computing, with Quansight and Google Summer of Code around open source software, and currently works at a hedge fund.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gunjjoshi/

Reviews

Sounds like an interesting talk, but it covers a lot of topics at once, and someone like me may find it hard to follow in a short slot. Could you focus on fewer things, show how stdlib fits in, and share a rough outline of what you’ll demo?

Reviewer #1 Not Sure