"Of JavaScript Ahead-Of-Time Compilation Performance" by Manuel Serrano (Strange Loop 2022)

Javascript

Discover Hop, a revolutionary JavaScript compiler, overcoming language challenges to generate better code and achieve comparable performance.

Key takeaways

JavaScript is a nightmare for compilers due to its complexity and dynamic nature.
The language’s syntax and semantics make it difficult to implement a static compiler.
JavaScript’s syntax is dynamic, with late binding and optional typing, making it challenging to generate efficient code.
The JavaScript interpreter is responsible for runtime checks, which slows down the execution.
The type inference process is complex, and the type system is not able to detect some types.
The JIT compiler’s performance is limited by its inability to optimize certain operations, such as floating-point numbers and function calls.
Hop, a static compiler for JavaScript, was developed to overcome these challenges.
Hop uses abstract interpretation to execute the program and detect types, allowing it to generate better code.
Hop’s performance is comparable to other JIT compilers, but it lacks the optimization capabilities of a peak-performance compiler.
The compiler uses opportunistic compilation to generate code that is as efficient as possible, given the input program.
The compiler’s optimization techniques include inlining, dead code elimination, and constant folding.
The results show that Hop outperforms other implementations in some cases, but its performance varies depending on the specific use case.
The compiler’s limitations are due to the complexity of JavaScript and the trade-offs between performance and static analysis.

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