6 posts tagged with "presentations"

In late 2018 we started a project called V8 Lite, aimed at dramatically reducing V8’s memory usage. Initially this project was envisioned as a separate Lite mode of V8 specifically aimed at low-memory mobile devices or embedder use-cases that care more about reduced memory usage than throughput execution speed. However, in the process of this work, we realized that many of the memory optimizations we had made for this Lite mode could be brought over to regular V8 thereby benefiting all users of V8.

Previously, we discussed how JavaScript engines optimize object and array access through the use of Shapes and Inline Caches, and we’ve explored how engines speed up prototype property access in particular. This article describes how V8 chooses optimal in-memory representations for various JavaScript values, and how that impacts the shape machinery — all of which helps explain a recent V8 performance cliff in React core.

Over the past years the V8 garbage collector (GC) has changed a lot. The Orinoco project has taken a sequential, stop-the-world garbage collector and transformed it into a mostly parallel and concurrent collector with incremental fallback.

Asynchronous processing in JavaScript traditionally had a reputation for not being particularly fast. To make matters worse, debugging live JavaScript applications — in particular Node.js servers — is no easy task, especially when it comes to async programming. Luckily the times, they are a-changin’. This article explores how we optimized async functions and promises in V8 (and to some extent in other JavaScript engines as well), and describes how we improved the debugging experience for async code.

JavaScript objects can have arbitrary properties associated with them. The names of object properties can contain any character. One of the interesting cases that a JavaScript engine can choose to optimize for are properties whose names are purely numeric, most specifically array indices.

BlinkOn is a biannual meeting of Blink, V8, and Chromium contributors. BlinkOn 6 was held in Munich on June 16 and June 17. The V8 team gave a number of presentations on architecture, design, performance initiatives, and language implementation.