David Mandelin's blog

This will be a short one: it’s been a fairly quiet week, with mostly fixes for crashes and other small bugs. The one big landing was ObjShrink, by Brian Hackett, which took the size of a JS object down from about 48 bytes (on 32-bit platforms) to 16 bytes. ObjShrink also made shapes (an auxiliary [...]

Help Firefox get incremental GC Bill McCloskey has incremental GC working as a prototype in the larch branch. The current version is probably pretty crashy but does show the pause time improvements on some sites. It would help Bill a lot to get a list of sites that have big GC pauses now in Firefox. [...]

Update since last time (11/1): Stuff that might affect you We are moving to a model where JSRuntimes are single-threaded. That means if you want to use multiple threads, you’ll create separate runtimes. (Web workers do this in Firefox now.) This is going to help us make a lot of simplifications to the engine, and [...]

For a while, I was pretty swamped, with not enough time to do a regular team newsletter. And then, I figured I’d have to go back over the past 2 months of activity to sort out everything that happened so I could write a proper giant update. But, I realize that’s way too hard and [...]

I’ve been swamped the past few weeks, so this is a bigger catch-up newsletter. I’ll just give the big news because there’s plenty of it. New Hire Nicolas Pierron has joined the JS team to work on IonMonkey. He has done a lot of work on the NixOS package system as well as a few [...]

New Hire Sean Stangl has joined the JS team. He worked on JägerMonkey last year as an intern, and now he’s here full-time, initially working on IonMonkey. Welcome, Sean! Project Status Updates Type Inference: Brian Hackett is fixing regressions and getting ready to “land” type inference. Landing is tricky because the complexity of the project [...]