[cromwellian]

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.

[pizlonator]

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.