January 23, 2019

nullprogram.com/blog/2019/01/23/

JavaScript’s prefix increment and decrement operators can be surprising when applied to typed arrays. It caught be by surprise when I was porting some C code over to JavaScript Just using your brain to execute this code, what do you believe is the value of r ?

let array = new Uint8Array ([ 255 ]); let r = ++ array [ 0 ];

The increment and decrement operators originated in the B programming language. Its closest living relative today is C, and, as far as these operators are concered, C can be considered an ancestor of JavaScript. So what is the value of r in this similar C code?

uint8_t array [] = { 255 }; int r = ++ array [ 0 ];

Of course, if they were the same then there would be nothing to write about, so that should make it easier to guess if you aren’t sure. The answer: In JavaScript, r is 256. In C, r is 0.

What happened to me was that I wrote an 80-bit integer increment routine in C like this:

uint8_t array [ 10 ]; /* ... */ for ( int i = 9 ; i >= 0 ; i -- ) if ( ++ array [ i ]) break ;

But I was getting the wrong result over in JavaScript from essentially the same code:

let array = new Uint8Array ( 10 ); /* ... */ for ( let i = 9 ; i >= 0 ; i -- ) if ( ++ array [ i ]) break ;

So what’s going on here?

JavaScript specification

The ES5 specification says this about the prefix increment operator:

Let expr be the result of evaluating UnaryExpression. Throw a SyntaxError exception if the following conditions are all true: [omitted] Let oldValue be ToNumber(GetValue(expr)). Let newValue be the result of adding the value 1 to oldValue, using the same rules as for the + operator (see 11.6.3). Call PutValue(expr, newValue). Return newValue.

So, oldValue is 255. This is a double precision float because all numbers in JavaScript (outside of the bitwise operations) are double precision floating point. Add 1 to this value to get 256, which is newValue. When newValue is stored in the array via PutValue(), it’s converted to an unsigned 8-bit integer, which truncates it to 0.

However, newValue is returned, not the value that was actually stored in the array!

Since JavaScript is dynamically typed, this difference did not actually matter until typed arrays are involved. I suspect if typed arrays were in JavaScript from the beginning, the specified behavior would be more in line with C.

This behavior isn’t limited to the prefix operators. Consider assignment:

let array = new Uint8Array ([ 255 ]); let r = ( array [ 0 ] = array [ 0 ] + 1 ); let s = ( array [ 0 ] += 1 );

Both r and s will still be 256. The result of the assignment operators is a similar story:

LeftHandSideExpression = AssignmentExpression is evaluated as follows: Let lref be the result of evaluating LeftHandSideExpression. Let rref be the result of evaluating AssignmentExpression. Let rval be GetValue(rref). Throw a SyntaxError exception if the following conditions are all true: [omitted] Call PutValue(lref, rval). Return rval.

Again, the result of the expression is independent of how it was stored with PutValue().

C specification

I’ll be referencing the original C89/C90 standard. The C specification requires a little more work to get to the bottom of the issue. Starting with 3.3.3.1 (Prefix increment and decrement operators):

The value of the operand of the prefix ++ operator is incremented. The result is the new value of the operand after incrementation. The expression ++E is equivalent to (E+=1).

Later in 3.3.16.2 (Compound assignment):

A compound assignment of the form E1 op = E2 differs from the simple assignment expression E1 = E1 op (E2) only in that the lvalue E1 is evaluated only once.

Then finally in 3.3.16 (Assignment operators):

An assignment operator stores a value in the object designated by the left operand. An assignment expression has the value of the left operand after the assignment, but is not an lvalue.

So the result is explicitly the value after assignment. Let’s look at this step by step after rewriting the expression.

int r = ( array [ 0 ] = array [ 0 ] + 1 );

In C, all integer operations are performed with at least int precision. Smaller integers are implicitly promoted to int before the operation. The value of array[0] is 255, and, since uint8_t is smaller than int , it gets promoted to int . Additionally, the literal constant 1 is also an int , so there are actually two reasons for this promotion.

So since these are int values, the result of the addition is 256, like in JavaScript. To store the result, this value is then demoted to uint8_t and truncated to 0. Finally, this post-assignment 0 is the result of the expression, not the right-hand result as in JavaScript.

Specifications are useful

These situations are why I prefer programming languages that have a formal and approachable specification. If there’s no specification and I’m observing undocumented, idiosyncratic behavior, is this just some subtle quirk of the current implementation — e.g. something that might change without notice in the future — or is it intended behavior that I can rely upon for correctness?