Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oscargrouch 2955 days ago
I guess the TurboFan backend of V8 is so powerful now that my guess is that it would be prepared to receive a Python or Lua frontend to it.

Current Javascript is very complex, so maybe the current V8 Turbofan backend would already be fit to process a Python bytecode carefully crafted to fit this particular JIT backend?

1 comments

From what I've seen, V8 is extremely wed to the javascript language model. I don't think it even has a concept of numbers that aren't javascript "numbers". Unless of course you go towards wasm territory, which I don't think is a territory particularly fun for dynamic languages.
WASM targets the TurboFan backend the same one the JS bytecode now does. So the backend can perfectly deal with a typed language like TS or Dart.

I think even in the frontend, the compiler try to guess the type beforehand, and anotate the real type for the compiler to optimize for the right type.

The problem is that i didnt dive that deep to know if a language as Python would be a good fit, nor im a "compiler guy" myself, so..

But i would love to do this as a backside project. The problem is my time is currently all taken by a big project.

But i would love to try to do this plug.. Thats why im winking here on HN. Maybe others also find a interesting thing to try themselves.

I never said that it is inappropriate for a "typed language", in fact, far from it.