Serialization

Val Town is a server-side platform, primarily: when you run code, it runs on a server. This has many benefits, like the ability to import many different modules, make requests to other servers, run code on a schedule, and much more.

It also means that when you run code and see the results of that code, the results have to be stored, encoded, sent to your browser, and then decoded into something readable. We try to cover as many bases as possible with this conversion: if your code returns a JavaScript string, number, array, Map, Set, and many other types – we’ll show you a very helpful representation of it.

However, there are some objects that aren’t really translatable from one environment to another, like Promise and Symbol objects. In some cases as well, code that returns data with recursive structures - self-references - will fail to be serialized, and produce an error.