3 ms·

I guess that v8 is leading a revamp in the languages. Even perhaps the bytecodes will die!! the AST IS the bytecode :D

• swah 15y ago
  What?
  • wingo 15y ago
    I think ceyusa was referring to the elision of bytecode as an intermediate step. Interestingly though, my assertion that V8 kept around the AST was wrong: it keeps around the source, and re-parses as needed. So maybe it's JavaScript that is the new bytecode now...
• masklinn 15y ago
  > I guess that v8 is leading a revamp in the languages. 1. v8 is an implementation, not a language, so it hardly makes sense to say v8 is leading a revamp in the languages. 2. most of v8's behaviors were pioneered by Self and put to task in JVMs (HotSpot and — even earlier — Jikes RVM) and Strongtalk (v8's assembler comes in significant parts from strongtalk, I believe), so it hardly makes sense to say that v8 is leading unless you restrict this to the pretty small world of javascript in-browser runtimes. 3. finally, other browsers were already walking down the route of JITs when Chrome arrived (Tracemonkey landed in Firefox trunk in October 2008) V8 is definitely a strong work of software engineering put to good use, but the amount of inane praises are grating: it's not magic and it's mostly the application of preexisting practical research and development (meaning stuff which was already used, not just research papers).
  • hobo5 15y ago
    in fact firefox trace and jaeger monkey are pretty nice themselves if not more than v8. theyre also faster often time
• kingkilr 15y ago
  I don't think so, in my experience working on dynamic languages there's no need to kill bytecode, it's a useful intermediary form, as you still need either a stage-one compiler or an interpreter anyway, and interpreters are (to a first approximation) easier to write.