
Launching Ignition and TurboFan - ingve
https://v8project.blogspot.com/2017/05/launching-ignition-and-turbofan.html
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_greim_
Something that annoys me about developing for V8 is that if you just write to
the language spec, you'll hit all kinds of de-optimization cases. There's this
constant voice nagging at the back of my mind saying "don't use try/catch,
it's slooow" or "don't use native promises, they're slooow". It's black magic
just to keep track of what's fast and what's slow in the language, and it
makes benchmarks even trickier and debatable than normal, if you can believe
it. I hope this resolves that by optimizing the language more evenly.

~~~
endymi0n
In the end, that's what killed JS in the backend for me for anything
nontrivial that needs decent performance. It gets you with things like "with
its JIT, your code might end up runnning faster than C" \- and while that's
true (!), it's going to come back biting your ass when anything falls out of
the optimization loop. And this "something" always eventually happens, is
often times a trivial one line change and will keep the whole team busy for
three days until finally debugged and fixed.

We're now building with Go. And while it's not the fastest language in
synthetic tests, it's proved to be super predictable. If something breaks or
leaks, it does so pretty hard (ever forgot a .Close() somewhere? :) and
anything that's off is easy to discover and optimize with PProf.

The V8 is an awesome and important piece of technology, but it's so complex
that it's almost impossible to say why something worked out - or didn't.

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Klathmon
Congratulations to the V8 team!

This has been years in the making and I'm excited to see the benefits in both
chrome and in node!

~~~
tbrock
It can't be said enough how amazing this work is. V8 and friends have really
pushed the web forward a tremendous amount by continually pushing the
JavaScript performance boundaries.

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cat199
anyone have any insight on why reddit on the desktop got slower? perhaps js
usage is so low that other factors dominate? hmm..

------
est
I saw there's ~8% performance "improvements" on Nexus 5X mobile browsing
Hacker News.

I think Hacker News requires very minimal javascript to run?

~~~
Houshalter
It says "Reduction in time spent in V8". So even if HN uses little javascript,
the javascript it does use is 8% faster. At least that's my interpretation.

