[yuchi]

Please, do not consider this article as normative.

Anyone trying to learn JS should have a look to more recent articles.

Examples:

- http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden - Good insight

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript - Good place to start learning, and for experienced developers a good place to contribute to

- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+inheritance+performance - Search for performance issues

PS: recently I found an article (probably here on HN) describing how v8 treats prototypes, and how to not break the performance boost given by v8 assumptions. Can someone remember which one was?

[shantanubala]

Though I don't know of an article, this video from a while ago describes (at a high level) the "hidden classes" that represent prototypes. It was part of the original launch of Chrome about 4 years ago. Some of the related videos have more info, but basically V8 represents prototypes as classes that act as a cache for the properties, so the lookup of properties within the prototype becomes much faster than a lookup for an ordinary property of an object.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWhMKalEicY

EDIT - Your comment inspired me to do some additional Googling -- here's another (text-based) description that's a little clearer: https://developers.google.com/v8/design#prop_access

[yuchi]

Exactly what I was looking for!