Potential naming confusion between WebIDL record types and the (proposed) JavaScript record type

[hober]

In TC39 there's a proposal to add a record type to JavaScript. Confusingly, it's entirely unrelated to WebIDL's record types.

I raised tc39/proposal-record-tuple#116 to suggest they rename it to avoid confusion.

This is the corresponding WebIDL issue, because maybe the right thing to do is to rename it in WebIDL.

[littledan]

My guess would be that most web developers haven't heard of WebIDL records, and just think of them as "objects". If we end up preferring the name "record" in TC39 (it's the best we've come up with so far), I wonder if this name change on the WebIDL side is feasible. We can help with the editorial updates across spec-land if it comes to that.

[annevk]

Are they even that incompatible? Should you not be able to pass a JavaScript record to https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/#headers for instance?

[littledan]

@annevk Heh, yes, you'd be able to use a JS Record as a WebIDL record; also as a dictionary. I sort of think of this compatibility at a different level: as being similar in usage to JS objects, when they coincide.