Show HN: An experimental data-flow analysis tool for JavaScript

  • Blog post on how it works: http://www.mattzeunert.com/2018/05/27/dynamic-dataflow-analy...

    This is really, really neat. Never would have thought that Babel could be used for instrumentation, though after a bit of digging it looks like https://istanbul.js.org/ uses a similar trick!

    Is there a way to integrate this into a local dev environment without needing to run the MITM proxy? (For instance, if you know you're loading everything through a single bundle.) Could be a really popular dev tool if so.

    Also, have you considered using IndexedDB to store the logs client-side, further removing the need for a backend? Storage should be practically unlimited if you have free drive space on desktop Chrome.

  • Pretty cool little tool. We have a product that is a combination of ASP.NET Razor views, Backbone, jQuery, and more as a result of several different partial transitions of the codebase. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out which framework is setting a given value in the UI, so I'm going to give this a try and see if it helps out.

  • Amazing! I would love to see something like this integrated into browser devtools. There should be massive perf benefits if you could work directly with the JS VM, for instance.

  • This is very cool! What do you believe to be the prime use cases for this kind of tool?

  • > FromJS shows you were each value in the DOM comes from.

    I think it's "...where each value in the DOM..."