Contributing to Boa

Boa welcomes contribution from everyone. Here are the guidelines if you are thinking of helping out:

Contributions

Contributions to Boa or its dependencies should be made in the form of GitHub pull requests. Each pull request will be reviewed by a core contributor (someone with permission to land patches) and either landed in the main tree or given feedback for changes that would be required. All contributions should follow this format.

Should you wish to work on an issue, please claim it first by commenting on the GitHub issue that you want to work on it. This is to prevent duplicated efforts from contributors on the same issue.

Head over to issues and check for "good first issue" labels to find good tasks to start with. If you come across words or jargon that do not make sense, please ask!

If you don't already have Rust installed rustup is the recommended tool to use. It will install Rust and allow you to switch between nightly, stable and beta. You can also install additional components. In Linux, you can run:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then simply clone this project and cargo build.

Running the compiler

You can execute a Boa console by running cargo run, and you can compile a list of JavaScript files by running cargo run -- file1.js file2.js and so on.

Debugging

Knowing how to debug the interpreter should help you resolve problems quite quickly. See Debugging.

Web Assembly

If you want to develop on the web assembly side you can run yarn serve and then go to http://localhost:8080.

Setup

VSCode Plugins

Either the Rust (RLS) or the Rust Analyzer extensions are preferred. RLS is easier to set up but some of the development is moving towards Rust Analyzer. Both of these plugins will help you with your Rust Development

Tasks

There are some pre-defined tasks in tasks.json

Build - shift+cmd/ctrl+b should build and run cargo. You should be able to make changes and run this task.
Test - (there is no shortcut, you'll need to make one) - Runs Cargo Test. I personally set a shortcut of shift+cmd+option+T (or shift+ctrl+alt+T)

If you don't want to install everything on your machine, you can use the Dockerfile. Start VSCode in container mode (you may need the docker container plugin) and use the Dockerfile.

Testing

Boa provides its own test suite, and can also run the official ECMAScript test suite. To run the Boa test suite, you can just run the normal cargo test, and to run the full ECMAScript test suite, you can run it with this command:

cargo run --release --bin boa_tester -- run -v 2> error.log

Note that this requires the test262 submodule to be checked out, so you will need to run the following first:

git submodule init && git submodule update

This will run the test suite in verbose mode (you can remove the -v part to run it in non-verbose mode), and output nice colorings in the terminal. It will also output any panic information into the error.log file.

You can get some more verbose information that tells you the exact name of each test that is being run, useful for debugging purposes by setting up the verbose flag twice, for example -vv.

Finally, if you want to only run one sub-suite or even one test (to just check if you fixed/broke something specific), you can do it with the -s parameter, and then passing the path to the sub-suite or test that you want to run.

Communication

We have a Discord server, feel free to ask questions here: https://discord.gg/tUFFk9Y

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