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by pizlonator 3360 days ago
WebKit is currently king on Octane fwiw.

We still think it's a great benchmark. V8 made the mistake of focusing only on this benchmark, so they didn't know that some of their Octane optimizations were bad for other scenarios. We didn't have that problem because we have always used a broader spectrum of benchmarks.
2 comments
bterlson 3360 days ago
Agreed, Octane was good as far as benchmarks go but you have to balance with a much larger set of benchmarks and always ground your work in real-world scenarios (something we focused heavily on from day one e.g. when we realized having an interpreter really helps startup on lots of real-world apps but doesn't do much for Octane score).

That said, FWIW I think Edge/Chakra gets the crown on Windows!

(I work on Chakra)

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vanderZwan 3360 days ago
Out of curiosity: does only having to target one OS make a difference here? Is it "easier" to get it to run fast? Any worries that you don't have compared to Firefox and Chrome, even though you purely work on the JS side of things?
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bterlson 3348 days ago
I'm sorry I missed your comment earlier, but hopefully replying later is better than never :)

ChakraCore is cross-platform now so we no longer get the benefit of a single platform. However back when we were only Windows there were advantages, certainly, if only because all the work spent getting everything working on different OSes can instead be invested in improving performance.

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cromwellian 3360 days ago
I don't think they only focused on Octane, it's possible they may have weighted it more highly, I can't speak for the v8 team (I don't work on v8), but that sounds like an oversimplification of what probably happened.

One example could be focusing on throughput instead of startup latency which could yield distorted outcomes for real world apps, or mostly app code that is mostly early-bound style OO code/monomorphic functional code vs code that is hostile to class shape analysis/PIC.

It seems in the last few years, especially with the idea of Web competing with native with stuff like asm.js for games, there was a focus on maximize throughput, but it's rare your typical interactive web app is running code that benefits from that.

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pizlonator 3360 days ago
Octane was V8's primary tuning benchmark. They tuned for it to the detriment of other benchmarks. Whether you call that "only focusing" on Octane or not is a matter of semantics to me.
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