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A comment on A New Bytecode Format for JavaScriptCore. Parent comment

Re:A New Bytecode Format for JavaScriptCore by steveklabnik on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:57PM (#20245357)
A bytecode is easier to keep stable than an AST is; an AST changes as the language changes, but that doesn't mean you have to change the bytecode, only change the transformation from the AST to the bytecode.

I have no idea if this is the reason, but it's a possible one.

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Re:A New Bytecode Format for JavaScriptCore by mhh__ on Friday June 21, 2019 @03:16PM (#20245524)
It's a bit of a micro-optimisation but ASTs are also usually represented fairly sparsely, so processing on bytecode could be much faster due to more efficient cache utilisation etc - some benefits from memory locality and also from bytecode usually being smaller in memory)

(I don't know JSC does it so that could be wrong)

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Re:A New Bytecode Format for JavaScriptCore by pizlonator on Friday June 21, 2019 @03:04PM (#20245411)
That’s a pretty good reason also.
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