On: Chromium Blog: A New Crankshaft for V8

[StuffMaster]

Sounds like they borrowed the tracing idea from mozilla.

[scott_s → StuffMaster]

Not really. It's a well-known VM optimization technique.

[cpr → scott_s]

First featured in Self many years ago, done by the same folks (Lars Bak and crew) who brought you V8. Then Sun bought their Smalltalk/Self-based company, and they built HotSpot for the JVM. Then Google hired them to do the same for Javascript, and now we have V8.

It generally takes about 10-20 years to get truly new ideas from the labs to consumer-level products.

[effn → cpr]

Neither Self nor HotSpot uses tracing. It's a relatively new compilation technique, the implementation in the original tracing paper used java bytecode as the source language.

I think you are confusing tracing with adaptive compilation.

[kingkilr → effn]

Actually there's even older work using tracing for re-optimization of assembley :)

[grayrest → StuffMaster]

They don't mention that they're tracing. I think they're just optimistically optimizing functions in hot loops.