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by natorion 3421 days ago
Great summary with a few nits!

I am not aware that Edge is "stupidly fast" on startup. Safari though, is indeed currently leading the field.

As you correctly outlined, V8 is indeed transitioning to a world with an interpreter+optimizing compiler only. If you are using Chrome Canary, there is a chance that you are already using the new pipeline :-).

Full disclosure: I work on the V8 team.

3 comments

> As you correctly outlined, V8 is indeed transitioning to a world with an interpreter+optimizing compiler only.

ECL and CLISP both settled on this model. CLISP started out as a bytecode interpreter and added GNU Lightning for native code generation. ECL started out as a source-to-source compiler to C and added a bytecode interpreter; both follow C calling convention as much as possible, at first for easy interop with C code and then for easy interop for the bytecode interpreter, which avoids the C++ interop problems mentioned in the talk.

From those who spoke at BlinkOn about Ignition, it sounded like some of the pushback had been about Octane, but there'd been some movement against worrying about the Octane regression from a view that Crankshaft was over-fitted to Octane.

How much of what's remaining is performance versus stability/correctness?

I gotta be honest, I've only heard that in comments and "not so reliable" sources, so I should probably remove it while I can.

As for the Ignition+TurboFan setup, are you really that far along already?

Last I heard a few months ago it still sounded like it was gonna be a while before TurboFan was fast enough in most cases to be able to handle it.

If so that's awesome!

It is progressing quite nicely. We still don't know yet when it is ready to graduate from Canary/Dev though. Lot's of stuff to do!