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by sfink
756 days ago
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That's not exactly right. I believe you're mixing up bytecode generation with compilation. The source code will indeed be compiled down to bytecode, but that doesn't count since it does not change the generality. As in, bytecode is no more specialized than the original source code. It's the same with shaders — the ubershader does not interpret the original shader source text. Both V8 and SM will interpret the bytecode until it warms up enough to be compiled to specialized machine code. ("Warms up" == "is observed to execute enough times".) There are some subtle distinctions about whether the interpreter is implemented in C++ or generated by a variant of the JIT code compiler, but as with the shaders the main point is whether it's executed in a way that works for everything or is specialized to a particular purpose (and varying degrees of specialization are implemented, with various mechanisms for falling back to a more general execution mechanism if the specialization assumptions no longer hold). Your SpiderMonkey doc link points to a section named "JavaScript Interpreter". The title is correct, that section is indeed about the mechanisms for interpreting JavaScript [bytecode]. The V8 link is a little tricky, since it leads off with "Code is initially compiled by a baseline compiler", but if you read a little further, it says "...the V8 team has built a new JavaScript interpreter, called Ignition, which can replace V8’s baseline compiler". Basically, V8 experimented for a while with dropping the interpreter, but for the reasons described well in that document, they went back to initially running in an interpreter. The article is quite nice and describes quite a bit about the tradeoffs involved. It's 8 years old, but I believe the overall picture isn't that different today. (Source: I am an engineer on the SpiderMonkey team.) |
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