
Inside V8 - A Javascript Virtual Machine - nreece
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Expert-to-Expert-Erik-Meijer-and-Lars-Bak-Inside-V8-A-Javascript-Virtual-Machine/
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jamie
I'm a little confused by how Google plans to go back and add further
optimization steps. From what I gathered from the video, they skip any IR
step, and compile the javascript source straight to machine code. Lars Bak
said a couple of times that the amount of code they generate was enormous.

If they skip building an IR, does that mean they intend to optimize the
javascript representation itself to get performance? I'm a novice here, so I'm
confused about where would they do things like unrolling loops and inlining
methods if not against the IR?

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vidarh
I haven't watched the video yet, but it's not _that_ hard to do loop unrolling
and inlining directly on the generated machine code.

It's tricky (but by no means impossible) to do this on arbitrary machine code,
but in this case they control the code generator, so they can make guarantees
about the structure, and if necessary they can keep track of information to
make optimizing the machine code directly easier.

