V8 VS JDK

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.

Completely gutted from the OpenJDK, last I checked. See here for the culprit PR: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/18688

> Yes, they're changing one aspect of signal handler use to work around this problem. They're not stopping the use of signal handlers in general. Hotspot continues to use signals for efficiency in general. See https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/9059727df135dc90311bd476...

This whole thread is about SIGSEGV, and specifically their SIGSEGV handling. However, catching normal signals is not about efficiency.

Some of their exception handling is still odd: There is no reason for a program that receives SIGILL to ever attempt continuing. But others is fine, like catching SIGFPE to just forward an exception to the calling code.

(Sure, you could construct an argument to say that this is for efficiency if you considered the alternative to be implementing floating point in software so that all exceptions exist in user-space, but hardware floating point is the norm and such alternative would be wholly unreasonable.)

> The wonderful thing about choosing not to care about facts is having whatever opinions you want.

I appreciate the irony of you making such statement, proudly thinking that your opinion equals fact, and therefore any other opinion is not.

This discussion is nothing but subjective opinion vs. subjective opinion. Facts are (hopefully, as I can only speak for myself) inputs to both our opinions, but no opinion about "good" or "bad", "nasty" or not can ever be objective. Objective code quality does not exist.

I remember talking to Brendan about the PreserveFramePointer patch during my first months at Netflix in 2015. As of JDK 21, unfortunately it is no longer a general purpose solution for the JVM, because it prevents a fast path being taken for stack thawing for virtual threads: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/d32ce65781c1d7815a69ceac...

Map doesn't implement the Collection interface.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/sha...

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.