Involving Students and Academia in Web Platform Implementation

Mikhail Barash (Univ. of Bergen, Norway)

TPAC 2025
Kobe, Japan & online
10–14 November 2025

Participation Policies

IRC

#students-web
(https://webirc.w3.org/?channels=students-web)

Agenda

Overview of collaboration between University of Bergen and TC39

Discussion

Summary & Next Steps

University of Bergen (UiB)

Bergen Language Design Laboratory, Department of Informatics

25+ years of involvement in programming language standardization work
C++: lambdas, tuples, auto, decltype (Jaakko Järvi)
Fortran: generics (Magne Haveraaen, Jaakko Järvi)
ECMAScript: member of Ecma International since 2021
WebAssembly: recently joined the Community Group

✅ We appreciate participation in standards and open-source work.

UiB: Implementation Work

Project Course: specialized for a small group of 2—5 students, who are mentored by industry professionals over ~12 weeks

Array Grouping
Upsert
Joint Iteration
Temporal
Signals

Thank you to the mentors!

Aapo Alasuutari, Eemeli Aro, Shane F. Carr, Luca Casonato, Philip Chimento, Ashley Claymore, Daniel Ehrenberg, Jonathan Kuperman, Kevin Ness, Daniel Minor, Nicolò Ribaudo, Justin Ridgewell, Yulia Startsev, Bryan Thrall, Rich Waldron

Elsewhere

Web Browser Engineering (by Pavel Panchekha & Chris Harrelson)

University of Utah
University of Washington
HAW Hamburg

Learning objectives are different.

UiB: Skills Acquired

Deep technical understanding of fragments of non-trivial codebases
Insight into collaborative and iterative nature of PL design
Teamwork, coordination in a distributed environment
Professional communication (JavaZone, Web Engines Hack Fest, local meetups in Norway)
Knowledge transfer

UiB: Contributions

Tests
Implementations in engines
Tutorials & talks
Co-authoring changes to a proposal spec using ecmarkup
Co-authoring changes to a proposal design
Scientific research on proposals

Still to explore

Reviewing proposals/spec
Presenting at committee meetings
Contributions to non-API proposals
Designing/authoring a proposal
...

UiB: Other Projects Around TC39

TC39 Minutes Explorer
Structural Search and Replace for showcasing syntactic proposals
Analysis of Process Documents
Categorization of TC39 proposals
Sources of feedback that TC39 uses
...

Most of these done under the auspices of TC39-TG5

UiB: Scientific Research on TC39

Meta-tool for specifying design spaces (case study: Records & Tuples)
Rocq mechanization of a fragment of Temporal → found minor inconsistencies
Rocq mechanization of Signals → establishing invariants
Agda mechanization of JS Modules semantics → establishing invariants
Language workbench for the ECMA-262 spec
...

TC39-TG5

Task Group on Experiments in Programming Language Standardization

Scope: To provide a forum for the discussion, development and dissemination of research work on the standardization of ECMAScript and related technologies.
https://github.com/tc39/tg5

TG5 & UCSD

Evaluating usability and effectiveness of MessageFormat 2.0 through a think-aloud study with software engineers and translators

Discussion

How does one connect students with standards groups?
How much involvement is needed from mentors, and how do we make that sustainable?
What are the incentives for standards groups and universities to participate?
What kind of contributions can we expect students to make, and how scalable this could be?
What kind of course structure supports this kind of work?

Involving Students and Academia in Web Platform Implementation

Participation Policies

IRC

Agenda

Overview of collaboration between University of Bergen and TC39

Discussion

Summary & Next Steps

University of Bergen (UiB)

Bergen Language Design Laboratory, Department of Informatics

UiB: Implementation Work

Project Course: specialized for a small group of 2—5 students, who are mentored by industry professionals over ~12 weeks

Thank you to the mentors!

Elsewhere

Learning objectives are different.

UiB: Skills Acquired

UiB: Contributions

Still to explore

UiB: Other Projects Around TC39

Most of these done under the auspices of TC39-TG5

UiB: Scientific Research on TC39

TC39-TG5

Task Group on Experiments in Programming Language Standardization

TG5 & UCSD

Discussion

Summary & Next Steps

➡️ A document describing possible types of student contributions?