the-super-tiny-compiler VS V8

Now, those concepts are a whole entire world to explore, and this is out of the scope of this article. I suggest the reading of the Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of the book Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom for a wider (but still practical) understanding of those subjects. Another practical great resource to look at is The SuperTiny Compiler. To explore them from a theorical point of view, you can find A LOT of resources from books or courses online.

The super tiny compiler by Jamie

I am currently writing a much more intricate version of the Super Tiny Compiler (https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler) in Rust, only I plan on handling many basic operations, essentially a compiler for a MUCH simpler version of Go. Great project idea btw, for anyone who wants to explore compilers. But in doing so, have really found a new respect for just what is going on when you gcc -o garbageprogram mytrashcode.c

Here, at least take this floatie: https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler

Outside of this, I recently learned about The Super Tiny Compiler which was a project written to be read. Mind you, it has a vast amount of comments, which may be more of a leg-up than you're asking for.

You could start here:

https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler

That converts from lisp-like to javascript. Really though this is a big field, and there are lots of resources out there.

To get started look at your input language; you'll need to lex and parse that. Then massage the parsed structure into the appropriate output.

You can see me convert brainfuck to C, or x86 assembly language here:

https://github.com/skx/bfcc

https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git/+/HEAD/include/c...

Due to the nature of web engine workloads migrating objects to being GC'd isn't performance negative (as most people would expect). With care it can often end up performance positive.

There are a few tricks that Oilpan can apply. Concurrent tracing helps a lot (e.g. instead of incrementing/decrementing refs, you can trace on a different thread), in addition when destructing objects, the destructors typically become trivial meaning the object can just be dropped from memory. Both these free up main thread time. (The tradeoff with concurrent tracing is that you need atomic barriers when assigning pointers which needs care).

This is on top of the safey improvements you gain from being GC'd vs. smart pointers, etc.

One major tradeoff that UAF bugs become more difficult to fix, as you are just accessing objects which "should" be dead.

> If that standard library would be written in JS, a new browser (or rather a new JS engine being a part of the browser) could just use some existing implementation

That sounds great, but I'm doubtful of the simplicity behind this approach.

If my understanding is correct, v8 has transitioned to C++[0] and Torque[1] code to implement the standard library, as opposed to running hard-coded JavaScript on setting up a new context.

I suspect this decision was made as a performance optimization, as there would obviously be a non-zero cost to parsing arbitrary JavaScript. Therefore, I doubt a JavaScript-based standard library would be an acceptable solution here.

[0]: https://github.com/v8/v8/tree/main/src/runtime

C++ lets you write anything you can imagine, and the language features and standard library often facilitate that. The committee espouses the view that they want to provide many "zero [runtime] cost," abstractions. Anybody can contribute to the language, although the committee process is often slow and can be political, each release the surface area and capability of the language gets larger.

I believe Hazard Pointers are slated for C++26, and these will add a form "free later, but not quite garbage collection" to the language. There was a talk this year about using hazard pointers to implement a much faster std::shared_ptr.

It's a language with incredible depth because so many different paradigms have been implemented in it, but also has many pitfalls for new and old users because there are many different ways of solving the same problem.

I feel that in C++, more than any other language, you need to know the actual implementation under the hood to use it effectively. This means knowing not just what the language specifies, but can occaissionally require knowing what GCC or Clang generate on your particular hardware.

Many garbage collected languages are written in or have parts of their implementations in C++. See JS (https://github.com/v8/v8)and Java GC (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/36de19d4622e38b6c00644b0...)

I am not an expert on Java (or C++), so if someone knows better or can add more please correct me.

Remember that we earlier established that every source gets parsed into an AST at some point before it gets compiled or interpreted. For example, platforms like Nodejs and chromium-based browsers use Gooogle's V8 engine behind the scenes to run JavaScript and of course, some AST parsing is always involved before the interpreter kicks in. I looked V8's source and I discovered it uses its own internal parser to achieve this.

In the source code of the Node.js opensource project, lib folder contains JavaScript code, mostly wrappers over C++ and function definitions. On the contrary, src folder contains C++ implementations of the functions, which pulls dependencies from the V8 project, the libuv project, the zlib project, the llhttp project, and many more - which are all placed at the deps folder.

Here is the implementation of of Array. prototype.map in V8. It's written in a language called Torque which appears to be a special language just for the v8 engine.

It sounds like you want to know how JavaScript is implemented in the browser. The thing is, there is no universal implementation for JavaScript. JavaScript defines a specification that must be adhered to, and then each browser vendor can implement it in whatever way they see fit, as long as it does the specified things. For example (and I'm not saying this is the case) it's entirely possible for Chrome to implement Array.sort() using merge sort, while Firefox implements it as quick sort. You can try to find the source code for the implementation in a certain browser, but that will not be universal. I imagine you can find out how it works in Chrome somewhere in https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8.git, though I'm not sure exactly where.