V8 VS node

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.

chrome v8 commits referring to spread operator one of them: https://github.com/v8/v8/commit/93b3397e52d3faf38059718de335027e57b9690d

NodeJS - Link

To get involved in the Node.js developer community, you can join community discussions or begin with learning if you’re new. The community discussion houses a GitHub list of issues related to Node.js' core features. If you want to chat in real time about Node.js development, there are Slack groups, and you can still connect with IRC clients or web clients when using the browser. Node.js has a calendar for public meetings.

Download the latest version from the Node.js website, open the package installer, and follow the instructions Use a package manager like Homebrew with the command brew install node On Linux, you can consult this page to determine how you should install Node.

As with all experimental things, a few things are missing. Some of these might lead to people using dotenv until support for these gets added. I will mention them here and let you see if they are dealbreakers. You can also follow the GitHub issue to track missing feature support.

Node

Depending on the stack of the repository you are cloning, you might have to install additional dependencies. For this demo, I'm using my own website, which is a static website built with Astro.js. It which requires to have Node.js installed and Yarn for package manager.

A working Node.js v20+ environment

We will be using the self-hosted version of Renovate distributed via npm, but you can adapt the scripts in this article to use the Docker version, or others. Make sure you have Node.js installed on your machine.

To execute the algorithm, we will use Node.js (for the JavaScript runtime) and node-fetch (for network requests). This means we will run the code locally from the command line. For this project, we will have an output folder to store all the README data, as well as a list (queue) of repository URLs to visit. Before diving into the code, it is important to plan the input and output of the algorithm. For this web crawler, we will start at a valid GitHub repository page, which would be one URL string. After visiting each page with a README, we will export the data into a new file. Now lets cover the process of requesting a repository page from a URL. For this, we only care about saving the README file that is displayed, and we will ignore any other links that GitHub displays (such as the navbar). We will send a URL request with node-fetch, and retrieve the result of a HTML string. If we convert the HTML string to a DOM Tree, we can search for a specific element. GitHub stores the README file under a div with the class "markdown-body". We can use a library called 'jsdom' to use Browser API methods, and return a specific node.

I believe that day has already come: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v20.x/api/worker_threads.html...

When you create a Worker with the worker_threads module, Node spawns a new V8 isolate in the same process: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/v20.12.1/src/node_worker...

It’s much more isolation than C threads – the entry point for a thread is a whole module (not a function), and threads must use message passing to communicate. They can share memory, but only via [Shared]ArrayBuffer objects.

But I think it'd meet your needs for an in-process isolated execution environment, which you can terminate from the main thread after a timeout.