Patrick Soquet

Software Architect

Patrick is an engineer and entrepreneur. A member of the founding team of at least four companies, Patrick’s contributions are grounded in dynamic language implementation. His first major effort was a CD-ROM authoring tool published by Apple in 1993 as the Apple Media Tool. In the same product category as Macromedia Director, this award winning authoring environment was far more elegant, thoughtfully designed, and reliable. As a founding member of Arboresecence, Patrick went on to design and implement the “Key” programming language. Arborecence was acquired by Vivendi largely due to the power of this innovative platform.

In 2002, Patrick created the XS virtual machine, his first JavaScript machine. This was the start of his work as a co-founder of Kinoma. At Kinoma Patrick targeted embedded devices from the very start, leaving room for developers to innovate the implementation of the language and the supporting runtime (graphics, networking, hardware support, etc).

With Sony as the lead customer, Patrick spearheaded projects at Kinoma to deploy XS into still cameras (including Sony’s first Wi-Fi enabled camera), video cameras, the Sony Reader ebook, and several PC companion applications. Patrick and the Kinoma team eventually broadened the scope of XS to support "smart" phones for Toshiba, Samsung, and Palm and implemented major upgrades to XS to incorporate changes in ECMAScript 5th Edition. It was around this time that Kinoma was acquired by Marvell Semiconductor where XS was deployed into HP printers, VIZIO televisions, iOS and Android mobile apps, and (soon) Whirlpool appliances as well as the Kinoma Create and Kinoma Element prototyping devices. During Patrick’s time at Marvell, XS became XS6 with a major update adding native support for nearly all the new capabilities of ES6 and the engine was released as open source under the Apache license.

Patrick has done the engine work himself, implementing the language, the parser, designing the byte code, and implementing the built-in objects. He has also maintained a source level debugger (xsbug), a performance profiler, and supporting command line tools (JavaScript compiler, linker, archiver, etc).

At Moddable, Patrick has contributed to significantly reducing the memory requirements to run ES6 to enable its practical use in real world products powered by microcontroller class hardware (under 100 MHz, under 64 KB RAM) without sacrificing functionality. .